Sharon Stone's sexiest films or, rather, ten times Sharon Stone took her clothes off and made us go weak at the knees.
This list doesn’t feature a collection of great movies. Let’s be clear about that. While a number of the films listed boast some strong performances and might be worth your time, Sharon Stone has taken her clothes off more times than she’s made good movies.
So, rather, this look at the sexiest films of the actress is a round-up of times the blonde bombshell made teenage boys go weak at the knees and grown men take a sharp intake of breath as their trousers tightened.
“F*ck like minks, raise rugrats and live happily ever after”: Sharon Stone’s sexiest movies
Sharon Stone in 1995 – IMAGE: (c) Sharon Stone – Instagram
You can put me in the generation that essentially founded the Sharon Stone Appreciation Society sometime in the early 1990s. Young people today won’t understand the impact Stone had on our lives – both boys and girls. Millennials missed out on the Stone effect.
Sharon Stone – on-screen – was a woman of serene beauty and unbridled sexuality who enjoyed the aura of Marilyn Monroe with a contemporary, steely toughness that saw her play with her sexual conquests like a spritely violinist cued by the orchestra to begin a vigorous solo.
In the early to mid-1990s, it was film after film of Stone ripping off her clothes, parading her cleavage, and saying she was taking no sh*t from anyone causing her harm or standing in the way of her, often, callous ambitions. For young teenagers staying up late to watch her films on TV, it was not only a lesson in female anatomy but revealed that “missionary” was not the only way to have sex.
Aging gracefully
Sharon Stone prior to the James Bond film premiere – IMAGE: Sharon Stone (Instagram)
While my appreciation of Sharon Stone’s sexiest moments in film might come across as a bit shallow, I’m genuinely a fan of the actress and feel her best work – aside from her incredible Oscar-nominated performance for Martin Scorsese in Casino – isn’t given the credit it deserves.
Image – Sharon Stone (Instagram)
But despite focusing on Sharon Stone the Sex Symbol, I’m taking nothing away from the actress’s legacy as a Hollywood star because she herself has embraced that image. And she still does so today.
Indeed, Stone posed naked for the September 2015 issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, in which she stated: “At a certain point you start asking yourself, ‘What really is sexy?’ It’s not just the elevation of your boobs. It’s being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that’s with you”.
(c) Harper’s Bazaar – Mark Abrahams
A year earlier, speaking to Oprah Winfrey about her “sex symbol” image, she said: “It’s a pleasure for me now. I mean, I’m gonna be 56 years old. If people want to think I’m a sex symbol, it’s, like, yeah. Think it up. You know. I mean, like, good for me.”
(c) Harper’s Bazaar – Mark Abrahams
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the movies that make Sharon Stone a legendary Hollywood sex symbol.
Fading Gigolo (2013)
The preposterous realisation that Sharon Stone’s sexually frustrated dermatologist pays John Turturro to have sex with her could only have come from the mind of a middle-aged man wallowing in his own ego. Luckily for Turturro, he wrote the script and directed Fading Gigolo, so he can massage these characters around whatever whim he desires.
And that whim desires Sharon Stone. And who can blame him. Two decades after the actress bared all in Basic Instinct, the 55-year-old (at the time of the film’s release) still had, in the words of Working Girl’s Tess McGill, “a head for business and a bod for sin.”
Co-starring Woody Allen, Sofia Vergara, Vanessa Paradis and Liev Schreiber, the film focuses on Turturro’s Fioravante who, with the help of his cash-strapped friend, Murray (Allen), becomes a professional Don Juan. However, when Fioravante falls in love, their friendship and business partnership is jeaopardised.
Total Recall (1990)
Sharon Stone exudes sex appeal by kicking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s butt wearing figure-hugging Spandex. The pair call a truce – after all, they are supposed to be husband and wife – but it’s a ruse on the woman’s part as she’s stalling for time.
Stone’s Lori tells her fake husband they could have passionate sex one last time. If he’s afraid, she explains, he can tie her up. The words accompany a provocative example of what “tying up” actually means as Lori wraps her wrists around the ties of her Spandex outfit.
Basic Instinct 2 (2006)
In 2006 Sharon Stone not only returned to the character that made her a Hollywood legend but also to the erotic thriller when sex was undoubtedly on the table… and in the bed, and the hot tub, and anywhere else it was convenient.
Basic Instinct 2 is memorable for all the wrong reasons. It’s a pointless sequel with some weak performances and a terrible script. That said, Stone is still seductive as Catherine Tramell and once again shows audiences there’s nothing quite like a Sharon Stone Sex Scene.
In the film, Tramell finds herself in London and back in trouble with the law. Scotland Yard appoints psychiatrist Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey) to evaluate her. However, like Michael Douglas’ Nick Curran before him, the horny shrink can’t help but get turned on when Tramell’s in his presence. And thus, the sadistic games begin again.
The 27th Golden Raspberry Awards dubbed the film “Basically, It Stinks, Too” and bestowed the Worst Actress award upon Stone alongside Worst Picture, Worst Prequel or Sequel, and Worst Screenplay.
Sliver (1993)
Sliver saw Sharon Stone continue her collaboration with Joe Eszterhas – who had written Basic Instinct and had become Hollywood’s hottest screenwriter – with the actress chucking Michael Douglas out of bed in favour of William Baldwin.
Certainly, Eszterhas’ trashy exploitation in Basic Instinct was somewhat forgiven thanks to its neat twists and sizzling performances but Sliver has none of that. A creepy William Baldwin is ably supported by an equally creepy Tom Berenger as Eszterhas and his producers try to cash-in on Stone’s sexy femme fatale persona with a film that’s as hollow as her one-dimensional character.
Even the sex scenes aren’t sexy. The first sees Stone’s Carly Norris weeping as she sits astride her male companion with the weasel-faced Baldwin telling her it’ll be alright. Rather, the sexiest scene takes place in the gym when Carly puts her thighs to the test with her male admirer’s hand provocatively touching her leg.
The Specialist (1994)
Headline sex scenes in Basic Instinct were followed by similar softcore activities in Sliver before Sharon Stone delivered her interpretation of THE SHOWER SCENE with Sylvester Stallone in The Specialist.
Instead of Norman Bates dressed up to look like his mother and stalking a showering woman with a kitchen knife, Sharon Stone was in a huge walk-in that was, luckily, big enough for Sly Stallone to take her in his arms and lay her on the warm, wet floor for an orgasm (or two).
If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000)
Made for HBO Films, If These Walls Could Talk 2 boasts an exceptional ensemble cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Paul Giamatti, Elizabeth Perkins, Michelle Williams, Chloë Sevigny, Ellen DeGeneres, and Regina King. Sharon Stone is definitely in good company.
This sequel follows the narrative structure of its predecessor with three segments concerning three different stories. Each is directed by a different person. Stone’s segment, in which she plays Fran, sees her eager to raise a child with her partner Kal (Ellen DeGeneres), using Tom (George Newbern) and Arnold (Mitchell Anderson) as sperm donors.
But the men have a change of heart which causes the women to reflect on what they want for their potential family and the challenges of raising a child in a society that considers their situation unconventional.
The segment features a passionate, tender love scene between Stone and DeGeneres under the direction of Anne Heche. It’s where the pair find the chemistry between the characters that, outside of the bedroom, is somewhat lacking.
Diabolique (1996)
Sharon Stone channels her Basic Instinct character Catherine Tramell for this sexy thriller in which she conspires to kill an abusive husband and pass the murder off as accidental death.
It’s a cruddy remake of Clouzot’s 1955 French-language film Les Diaboliques and saw Stone nominated for a Razzie but “luckily” losing to Pamela Anderson for her performance in Barb Wire.
There isn’t a lot of sex in the film but Stone does enjoy a rough ride on Chazz Palminteri (the abusive husband, and in the case of Stone’s Nicole Horner, an increasingly unpleasant adulterer).
The Muse (1999)
Sharon Stone is great in this quirky comedy-drama from writer-director Albert Brooks in which she plays a “modern day muse”. For me, she’s tailormade for the part! This beautiful devil-may-care woman agrees to take on struggling screenwriter Steven Phillips (Brooks) as her latest project to help spark his ailing creativity.
The Muse, perhaps surprisingly, features one of Stone’s most memorable nude scenes in which she goes full frontal while getting into a bed. Stone spoke about the scene on the Anna Faris is Unqualified podcast and said that it was she – not Brooks – who insisted on being nude.
The actress said: “I talked Albert Brooks into allowing me to be naked in The Muse. I wanted to be naked, because in the scene with Andie MacDowell, [my character doesn’t] want her to be in the bed with me, and I’m like, ‘the best way to not have in the bed with me is to not have any clothes on.’
“And Albert’s like, ‘well what would that look like?’ and I’m like, ‘it would look like my big ass getting in the bed naked and it’s funny because she would be horrified. She’d be so horrified that I did that, that she wouldn’t get in.”
Stone, who has never been afraid of being nude on screen, added that she’s of the belief that nude scenes are vital only if it increases the “impact and importance of the scene.”
Casino (1995)
Few would disagree that Sharon Stone’s depiction of a drug-addicted sin city muse is one of her finest screen performances. Like director Martin Scorsese’s dazzling look at the spectacle that is Las Vegas, almost fetishising the neon lights, card dealers and slot machines, this translates similarly to his staging of Stone’s Ginger McKenna, framed to wallow in both the beauty and ugliness of her multi-toned hustler.
There’s an element of nostalgia in looking back at Casino with rose-tinted glasses. Recalling a Vegas now long-gone; the smaller venues run out of town by the big boys and online poker tournaments changing the landscape of the clientele, Scorsese’s film has aged well as a time capsule of an equally glorious and dark era in Vegas’ history.
Ginger McKenna embodies that perfectly. In her relentless pursuit of winning (be that riches, lifestyle, reputation) she’s increasingly susceptible to losing. And like the unpredictable nature of gambling, she takes chances that see her both fly and fall; the glamour juxtaposed with the grim reality of her paranoid narcissism.
Sharon Stone in Casino (1995)
It’s little wonder Stone received a Best Actress nomination for a role that, at the time of release, Roger Ebert called her “best”. Stone recalls the film arriving at a point in her career when everything just clicked for her, not least the inspirational opportunity to work with Robert De Niro and Scorsese. She told The Guardian that watching the film reminds her that she’s not “deluding” herself and that “I really can do it”.
She says, “I got up to bat with my dream people, the one actor that all my career I strived to work with, that was the apex for me… and then Marty… And then to get the pat on your back from your peers [Oscar nomination] is always pretty great. You know, you don’t get a lot of that.”
Outside of the film’s violence, it is Ginger’s angry eruptions that often stand out, in particular during the unforgettable scene in which she trashes her own driveway and uses a pair of hapless cops as a shield to get belongings from her home.
With Casino arriving in 1995, Stone put a stop to the string of erotic thrillers she’d appeared in during the early 1990s. However, she appears in a love scene in which she has some angry sex with Joe Pesci’s lunatic gangster. Unlike the previous eroticism we’ve seen from the actress, in Scorsese’s film her sexiness comes not from the act of lovemaking but the twinkle of a diamond necklace and the throw of a pair of dice at the craps table.
It wasn’t until Casino that Hollywood really took Sharon Stone seriously. Until then she was a B-movie darling or A-film totty willing to take her clothes off on camera. She turned heads for her fierceness in Basic Instinct but it was largely her exploits in the bedroom (and the police interrogation room) that won her fans. Scorsese found a performance in her that showcased startling efficiency navigating the light and dark shades of a woman living life in the fast lane without a brake.
Basic Instinct
Basic Instinct is now legendary for its groundbreaking depictions of sexuality in a mainstream Hollywood film. Featuring one of the most talked about scenes in film history, it redefined the erotic thriller genre and influenced those that followed in the 1990s.
Sharon Stone is Catherine Tramell, a stunning, enigmatic novelist with a talent for seduction and a history of relationships that end in death. The demise of a former rock star sends a cop on the hunt for the killer and he begins to suspect Tramell is his prime suspect.
Basic Instinct begins with a sex scene between an unknown blonde woman and a rock star named Johnny Boz. The woman sits astride the man. She’s in control. She accentuates this dominance by unveiling a silk scarf from under a pillow, tying the man’s hands to the headboard. As both appear to reach orgasm, she leans back, picking up a secreted ice pick. She then violently stabs the man many times in a frenzied and manic attack.
The sexiest scenes in Basic Instinct occur when the sadomasochism is used as a dramatic backdrop. As Michael Douglas’ detective grows more deeply infatuated by Catherine Tramell, the pair enjoy a passionate romp in bed fuelled by cocaine.