After A Terrible Near-Death Experience, Sharon Stone, Talks About Getting Older in Hollywood

Sharon Stone is 66 in March, yet the Hollywood icon is unafraid of getting older in a profession that frowns on older actresses. Instead, the Basic Instinct actor has said that she views each year as a celebration of being “alive and healthy” and a time to be appreciative.

“I like being alive and well. And I believe we should all be ecstatic to have made it,” Sharon told The Times in the United Kingdom. “Because I’ve witnessed any number of people not making it.” “I think that people who are embarrassed about being older are just stupid and ungrateful,” she said.

Sharon’s decision to celebrate life did not come out of nowhere; at the age of 42, a torn vertebral artery caused internal bleeding in her brain for nine days, bringing her close to death. She was given a one percent chance of survival, yet she survived, only to see her life shift irreversibly when her marriage ended and her career options began to decrease.

“I lost everything,” she told People magazine in October 2023 of those years, “all those things that you feel are your real identity and your life.”

“I never really got most of it back,” she said, “but I’ve reached a point where I’m okay with it, where I really do recognize that I’m enough.”

In early 2023, the mother of three confessed that she had lost “half of my money” as a result of Silicon Valley Bank’s failure. Without going into detail, the actor encouraged attendees to phone and give money at the Women’s Cancer Research Fund’s (WCRF) An Unforgettable Evening event, before admitting it might be “difficult” to transfer money via technology.

“I understand that figuring out how to SMS the money is challenging. I’m not a technical expert, but I can write a [expletive] check. And right now, that’s courage, too, because I know what’s going on,” she explained. “I just lost half my money to this banking thing, and that doesn’t mean that I’m not here.”

Sharon is back to work — her new film What About Love will be released in February 2024 — and she is expanding her philanthropic ventures, joining the board of the Barrow Neurological Foundation, an institution at the forefront of neurological research and treatment led by Dr. Michael Lawton, the surgeon who saved Sharon’s life.