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Sharon Stone learned "how to have a spine" after starring in ‘Basic Instinct”
The 63-year-old actress said her role in Paul Verhoeven's 1992 movie gave her an insight into the fear that society instills into people when they "see a woman access and own her power” and believes the experience taught her how to look after herself.
Sharon told Instyle: "I was 32 when I got the part of Catherine Tramell in ‘Basic Instinct’. It was probably as late as you could be in your career without a big break. But from the moment I read the script, I knew I was the right person for the role. It was an intellectually complex part, and I felt like I had a real grasp on it."
Sharon - who only made $500,000 on the picture while her co-star Michael Douglas took home $14 million -and made sure she was given the option to "keep the clothes" in her contract.
She said: "People thought I was crazy, but the truth is I wasn’t getting paid much compared to my male co-star, so keeping my costumes was a really smart thing to do."
The ‘Catwoman’ star - who is mother to Roan, 21, Quinn, 15, and Laird, 16, - revealed that she was asked to lose her knickers before filming the movie's famous interrogation scene as it was “reflecting the light”.
Sharon said: "The cinematographer told me that they couldn’t see anything. In those days, the monitors were much less sophisticated than they are now, so even when they played it back for me, I didn’t see any issues."
However, Sharon didn’t realise that people could see up her skirt and thinks it would have been "much fairer and more reasonable" if someone had run it by her before it was filmed.
She said: "It would’ve been a much fairer and more reasonable thing for them to have shown it to me alone first, but it was a part of the movie, and I’m sure they didn’t want some new actress overreacting and telling them what to do."