Sharon Stone is best known for her breakout role as Catherine Tramell in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct but while the raunchy 1992 film catapulted her to fame, her time on set was far from easy.
The actress, who turns 65 today (March 10), admitted she started suffering from strange symptoms while filming, which some of the cast and crew assumed was a sign she was using drugs.
But Stone revealed that she had actually been suffering from “mini seizures” that no one would believe her about.
READ MORE: Sharon Stone’s younger brother ‘dies suddenly’ two years after his baby son passed away
It turned out that the seizures were the early signs of a major stroke that would go on to nearly kill her a decade later.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Stone explained: “I was clearly having some mini seizures when I was doing ‘Basic Instinct,'”
“I would go like this. [She tilts her head back and flutters her eyes.] I used to tell people I was having them, and nobody would believe me.”
(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
Stone said that Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven told her that the cast and crew believed that she was on drugs during the seizures, and she tried to convince him they were wrong.
“Verhoeven said, ‘People think you’re taking drugs at work.’ And I kept saying, ‘I’m not taking drugs, and I don’t know why this happens to me.’ So when this [stroke] happened, there was a little bit of ‘Ohhh’,” she added.
In 2001 Stone suffered a massive stroke and cerebral haemorrhage.
Not realising what had happened, the actress didn’t go to hospital until three or four days into her brain bleed, she told Variety in 2019.
(Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
Doctors gave her just a 1% chance of survival by the time she went in for surgery and said that they wouldn’t know for a month whether she would live or die.
Despite the odds, Stone survived the terrifying ordeal but over a decade on she continues to suffer from health issues.
The brain injury left her with some hearing loss in her right ear that makes it difficult to have conversations with groups and her brain still swells when she has a cold, she told the New Yorker.
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
She added: “My brain seizes 24/7, but I take a drug to stop that.”
Stone also revealed that she turned into a completely different person after the stroke.
“I bled so much into my subarachnoid space that my brain was literally shoved into the front of my face. The right side of my face fell from the pressure. I feel almost like my DNA shifted,” she explained.
“I was a sort of curvaceous, full kind of person, and I lost eighteen per cent of my body mass.”
Stone’s health issues weren’t the only struggles she was going through on the set of Basic Instinct.
Opening up about how the sexual film impacted her life during a recent appearance on the Table for Two podcast, she revealed that she also lost custody of her son at the same time.
(Image: Corbis via Getty Images)
“I lost custody of my child. When the judge asked my child, my tiny little boy, ‘Do you know your mother makes sex movies?’ This kind of abuse by the system, that it was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie,” Stone said.
She added: “People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now, and you saw maybe like a sixteenth of a second of possible nudity of me – and I lost custody of my child.”
She said that the heartbreak of losing custody added to her physical health issues, explaining: “I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart. It broke my heart.”
READ NEXT:
Follow the Daily Star US on Facebook
All the news, entertainment, sport and fun stuff you love about the Daily Star, brought to you by our American team.
Give the Daily Star US Facebook page a follow to make sure you’re not missing out.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
