LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Sharon Stone, who has been catapulted to the pinnacle of success after her critically acclaimed venture of ‘Basic Instinct’ of 1992 has always been a vocal spokesperson of gender disparity in terms of pay. Stone, 65, not only had to fight to survive a near fatal brain bleed and Hollywood’s subsequent abandonment, she also had to suffer pay discrimination. Stone, who now enjoys a modest net worth of $60 million, once revealed during an interview the paltry salary she received for her breakthrough role in 'Basic Instinct'.
Stone’s rise and fall in the industry is something which she has likened to that of Princess Diana’s. In a recent interview to The Hollywood Reporter, Stone revealed that while Princess Diana was adored as the People’s Princess, she too rose to fame after ‘Basic Instinct’. But as Princess Diana was “forgotten” after death as said by Stone, the star too was out of the limelight after her stroke.
Stone’s debut in ‘Basic Instinct’ established her as a talented actress in the niche genre of erotic dramas. But do you know how much the lead actress made from the movie that went on to gross a whopping $352.9 million in the Box Office at a budget of $49 million?
In an interview at the Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF) in Saudi Arabia in December 2022, Stone revealed that she received $500,000, whereas the film’s star Michael Douglas made pay day with a cheque in double figures. The ‘Total Recall’ star acknowledged, “I made $500,000, and Michael Douglas made $14 million,” as per Screen Daily. However, the film helped the starlet in launching her Hollywood career and brought her to the center of global fame.
Nevertheless, everything was not as rosy as the young Stone found herself garnering many unwanted attention too. It became an absolute necessity for her to hire securities but she could not do so because of money constraints. “Michael could afford the car, driver, bodyguard. I had to move because people were on my roof and breaking my door down. I couldn’t afford the things I needed because of the sudden fame I had,” said the ‘Silver’ star.
‘It’s time for you to pay a woman more than $1m’
As she played bold characters in her movies, she is also a resilient character in real life as she took the matter to the studio to ask for a pay hike to at least a million. She said during the talk, “‘It’s time for you to pay a woman more than $1m’ – which had never happened before. It was a big moment not just for me, but for the film industry.”
In a separate interview with The Guardian, she also bemoaned the fact she used to get so much less than any of her male co-star. She revealed, “After 'Basic Instinct', no one wanted to pay me.” Stone added, “I remember sitting in my kitchen with my manager and just crying and saying: ‘I’m not going to work until I get paid.’ I still got paid so much less than any men.”
‘It was very conflicting to the masculine industry’
The effects of her success in ‘Basic Instinct’ was not only short term but also long term, it not only made the gender disparity of Hollywood extremely clear, but also propagated the stereotypical idea of sexualizing women and attributing behavioral traits based solely on the fictional characters she played on-screen. Thus she believed that it was difficult to break down the “barriers” in what is an inherently male dominated industry, “To break down these barriers, for women to be powerful in film, for women to be paid, to have equal rights – it was very conflicting to the masculine industry.” She recalled the pain that she had to undergo of losing her children in custody battle during her divorce, “There was this backlash that I must be like my character – I must be killing people and naked and showing my vagina in the supermarket. It became personally traumatic in my life; I lost custody of my baby in my divorce, because the judge decided I was making sex movies.”
“I was greatly punished – it destroyed my personal life, my personal rights. It destroyed the way people thought about me as a human being – people went around saying ‘she’s like that character, because she couldn’t play that if she wasn’t that.’ I wasn’t acknowledged for the quality of my work until 20 years later,” mourned the star who never got the respect during her initial days in Hollywood.
