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Stone: Making it in Tinseltown

Making a name for yourself in Hollywood has never been easy. It takes dedication, looks, a little bit of talent and a whole lot of luck. Oh ... and taking your panties off can't hurt either.

Sharon Stone will forever be remembered for uncrossing her legs in front of Michael Douglas and his police cronies in "Basic Instinct," baring all to them -- and us. Up until late last year, it seemed like Stone would never be able to shake the image of herself as the bisexual, ice pick-wielding, seductive Catherine Tramell. Though she tried, audiences were not interested in seeing her play against type, and her thin performances couldn't change their minds.

That all changed with "Casino." A generally overwrought and unoriginal film, its greatest redeeming quality is Stone's portrayal of a former Vegas prostitute who becomes the wife of Robert DeNiro's Mafia-controlled casino manager. This was no easy feat: She had to stand out against DeNiro and Joe Pesci, who were working with their Godfather, Martin Scorsese. Stone managed to create the most shaded, three-dimensional performance of her career.

Ginger McKenna is a woman so obsessed with money that she marries DeNiro's Ace Rothstein, despite the fact that she is incapable of ever loving him. After their marriage, she slips deeper and deeper into the abyss of drug addiction and depression. Her quiet moments are just as dramatic and fascinating as her tirades and tantrums, and she is always precariously balancing on the line between sympathetic heroine and irritating bitch. It is a marvelous performance.

And for the first time, Stone, 38, is getting real recognition. Though her name was not called when the envelope was opened Monday night, her Academy Award nomination was the cherry on top of her recent critical success, a back-patting that included winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Dramatic Actress in January. After years of limiting herself to poorly written roles in mediocre films, Stone was finally given a chance with "Casino" to prove that she can be much more than a one-note femme fatale.

The amazing thing about Stone's career is that she has remained a huge star, despite the fact that she has only helmed one true blockbuster. Born in Meadville, Penn., she studied creative writing and fine arts at Edinboro College and has been described by many colleagues as one of the most intelligent stars in Hollywood.

After winning several local beauty pageants, Stone moved to New York to begin a modeling career, hawking such products as Diet Coke and Ford cars. She got her film debut in 1980 from Woody Allen in his "Stardust Memories." Though she was on screen for less than 10 seconds, blowing a kiss to Woody from a train, she had already cemented her status as male fantasy.

For the next 10 years, Stone plodded her way through numerous television movies and low-budget films that you've probably never heard of. The highlight of this phase was her deft comic turn in "Irreconcilable Differences," but she also stooped as low as "Police Academy 4" and "Action Jackson."

Her first role to gain public attention came in 1990, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's dangerously assertive wife in "Total Recall." The character was complete camp, and Stone managed it well enough: Now sexy, now deadly, now funny, now dead at the hands of a "divorce" -- Arnold style.

"Total Recall"'s director, Dutch-boy Paul Verhoeven, gave Stone her star-making role two years later in "Basic Instinct." Her portrayal of Catherine Tramell was a stroke of feminist genius, getting men so hot and horny that they didn't realize they were being used and overpowered. She was every man's fantasy turned into their worst nightmare -- a sort of black widow spider. Except she didn't wait until after sex to kill her mate, she'd whip out the ice pick in mid-coitus and reciprocate his penetration in her own way.

But despite the fact that this was essentially a strong female role, women began despising Stone because of her unabashed sexuality, seeing her as "the slut from that soft-porn." True, "Basic Instinct" was an explicit movie, and the interrogation scene, no matter how hard Stone insists that she was manipulated into it by Verhoeven, will force her to forever live in pantiless infamy.

But the weight of Stone's performance should not be discounted. She upstaged Michael Douglas, turning him into a walking pile of Jell-O in her presence. She even upstaged the camera itself with her frighteningly seductive performance, one that was generally overlooked -- other than a Golden Globe nomination and the prestigious "Most Desirable Female" MTV Movie Award.

Stone's next role did nothing to decrease that image. "Basic Instinct"'s screenwriter, the overrated and undersexed Joe Eszterhas, seems to have created the lead in "Sliver" just for her. This time, Stone got to masturbate in a bathtub and hand her panties over (in a restaurant) to William Baldwin. But there's nothing interesting for her to do here; she is no longer the temptress, but the hapless victim, the same sort of problem she encountered in subsequent films.

In "Intersection," Stone played the betrayed wife of Richard Gere instead of, more appropriately, his mistress. In "The Specialist," she is forced to "act" alongside Sylvester Stallone, as if that's possible. And in "The Quick and the Dead," which she co-produced, Stone plays it sad while Sam Raimi's quick-witted satire is going on all around her.

This recent string of failures makes one wonder how Sharon Stone maintains her star status at all. And it makes her turn in "Casino" all the more pleasantly surprising. It was clear that Stone had talent, but her audience was beginning to wonder whether she would ever be given an opportunity to show it again. With "Casino," she has seemingly launched a whole new career for herself, that of a serious, versatile actress. In her latest film, "Diabolique," she revamps her dangerously sexy persona, but she goes for broke in Bruce Beresford's upcoming "Last Dance," in which she plays an inmate on death row, replete with Southern accent.

After earning only $300,000 for "Basic Instinct," Sharon Stone now commands a $6 million salary and owns her own production company, Chaos. She has gone from bit player for her looks to Oscar nominee for her talent. It seems like she can finally shake off the baggage of her femme fatale image and get down to some serious acting. And, frankly, it's about time.