A few days prior to our interview last month, Sharon Stone shared on Instagram that her mother had passed away. When we connect via video call, I extend my condolences. Stone, famed for her blunt honesty, surpasses her usual candor.

‘Mom, Dot, actually passed several months back, but I felt ready to share it with the public now because when people die, I get hit with intense emotions first,’ she reveals.

Curious, I inquire about the nature of these emotions – could it be grief, confusion, or loss? She grins and says, ‘It’s a mix of anger and a dash of, ‘I didn’t f****** need you anyway,’ if you know what I mean!’

Now she’s laughing. ‘My mom wasn’t of a sunny disposition. She was hilarious, but she said terrible things to me. Dot swore like a Portuguese dock worker.’

Which takes us to her mother’s final days. ‘She said, ‘I’m going to kick you in the c***’ to me probably 40 times in the last five days. But that was her delirium.

‘And when the last thing your mother says to you before she dies is, ‘You talk too much, you make me want to commit suicide’, and the whole room laughs, you think: that’s a hard one to go out on, Mom! But that’s how she was. This lack of ability to find tenderness and peace within herself.’

Stone doesn’t do small talk. The actor, who became a household name with the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct, is here to chat about her new film, Nobody 2, but the movie is going to have to wait.

Stone talks about what she wants to talk about and today family dysfunction has top priority. To be fair, this makes sense – its impact has dominated much of her life, despite being hidden from the public until her 2021 memoir, The Beauty Of Living Twice.

Sharon Stone attending the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards earlier this year

Sharon became a household name with the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct 

Late last month, Sharon announced on Instagram that her mother Dorothy (pictured) had died

That was when she revealed her maternal grandfather was a violent abuser and a paedophile. She said there hadn’t been a day in her mother’s life when Dot had not been beaten by him, from the age of five until she left the family home at nine to go into domestic service. Stone also said he had abused her and her sister when they were little girls.

You never know what to expect with Stone. Horrifying trauma in one sentence, shopping at [fashion brand] Cos the next. She’s at home in Los Angeles when we talk and looks fabulous – blonde bob, huge pink specs, pearls ‘the size of small quail eggs’, a baggy white shirt, white trousers ripped in all the right places.

She moves away from the smartphone, so I can see. ‘I will show you my entire ensemble. The shirt’s down to my knees. Let me put you on my bookshelf and then you can see all of me.’ Now, she’s using her smartphone as a mirror. ‘I’m putting a little lipstick on for you.’ I tell her I like her glasses. ‘Oh thanks. I’m a glasses whore, I have to be honest.’

Stone has often talked about being shy to the point of agoraphobia but there is little sign of it today. As Dot said, she’s a talker: let the camera roll and you’ve got yourself a one-woman show.

Imagine a scatological Norma Desmond as written by Alan Bennett. Her voice is deep and mafioso raspy. She talks in italics, deals in extremes, tells outrageous story after outrageous story, segueing between the savage and the empathic, naming names to give libel lawyers a heart attack, before finishing her sentences with, ‘right?’ as if daring you to disagree. For now, though, she’s not finished with Dot. Stone is 67 and for much of her life she thought her mother hated her. It was only later, when they became closer, that she understood how troubled Dot’s life had been.

Stone says Dot had a terrible death. ‘She was desperately afraid that when she died her mother and father would be there. She didn’t want to die, because she didn’t want to see them, because they were so awful.

‘So I convinced her that I had put them in jail and they were not going to be there. She was in such hell.’ She pauses. ‘Nobody comes through this life intact. So why do we pretend that one does?’

Her mother certainly didn’t. Nor, for that matter, has Stone. In her memoir, she describes being locked in a room with her grandfather and her sister. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, merging the specific with the abstract so you’re never sure exactly what happened. At one point, she walks into a room when he appears to be sexually abusing her sister.

Did he sexually abuse Stone, too? ‘Yes. And when I said so in my book, everybody went crazy about it and said I was telling other people’s stories. They were like: you’re telling your sister’s story, or this story, or that story. And I wasn’t telling anybody’s story. I didn’t name anybody’s name in my book. Not anybody unless they did any good.’

It’s classic Stone, told with utter conviction – although she did name her sister. Was her sister upset with her? ‘She’s refused to read my book, even though she encouraged me to write it, as did my mom, and I dedicated my book to Mom.’

Did her grandfather sexually abuse her mother, too? ‘Yes, of course, and all of her sisters. That’s why she was removed from her home when she was nine.

Sharon in the 1995 hit Casino directed by Martin Scorsese

‘In her gym class, she was bleeding through the back of her uniform and her teacher brought in social services. They removed her shirt and she had been so badly beaten that her back was covered in scars and blood. I think the abuse is why all of her sisters went crazy. They were all treated for mental health problems. There were five of them and only my mom lived past 50. And they had a couple of other sisters who died in their early childhood.’

I ask how long her grandfather abused her for. ‘I got away from him by the time I was five or six, before he was super-sexually abusive to me. I was a very savvy kid. I got away with much lighter abuse than other people did.’ Stone knows she has upset people by exposing family secrets, but she’s willing to pay the price. ‘When you’re the person to break the family chain, nobody likes you, right? People just think you’re crazy.’

Although Stone’s relationship with her mother was troubled, she did observe love between her mother and father, Joe.

Despite him being a harsh disciplinarian in her early years, Stone went on to have a wonderful relationship with Joe, a factory worker who became a tool and die manufacturer. He was a huge influence on her, showing her how to assert herself in a man’s world. ‘My Dad and I were tighter than two coats of paint.’

I tell Stone I could listen to her talking about her family for ever, but we should talk about movies – particularly Nobody 2.

She doesn’t seem to hear, because she has moved on to the contemporary US. ‘When the President decides to remove democracy, does that remove our agreement to respect the office of the Presidency?’ That’s a good question, I say. What do you think? She says she doesn’t know, that she’s a Buddhist and in Buddhism they call it a ‘koan’ – a paradoxical riddle that invites deep thought rather than a simple answer.

She talks about the way the rights of protected minorities are being removed: ‘In our current administration, any disability is considered a f***-off.’

‘We were tighter than two coats of paint,’ Sharon says about her relationship with her father Joseph Stone

From left: Sharon, father Joe, mother Dorothy, and sister Kelly Stone

Take dyslexia, she says. Her son Roan has it ‘and he is running three corporations’. Her brother Patrick, who died in 2023, had it and was a ‘brilliant’ master carpenter. She points out that many architects and scientists are dyslexic. ‘But what we’re looking at now in America, is, ‘OK, no more disabilities’. OK, we’re gonna fire everyone in these scientific jobs. And guess what? France is taking all of our scientists.’

Blimey! It’s not easy to keep up with Stone or get a word in (evidence suggests scientists are moving from the US to France because of funding cuts).

The young Stone was exceptionally bright, as she’s quick to tell me. She describes herself as ‘fiercely intelligent’ (two well-chosen words) and her IQ is reportedly 154 (genius level).

She skipped several grades at school; at 15, she and four boys were sent to Edinboro State College in Pennsylvania as an ‘experiment’, three years ahead of most of their peers. She majored in English literature and excelled at golf, but left before graduating. ‘My college professor was furious when I was leaving for modelling,’ she says. ‘He was like, ‘You’re throwing away your career’, because he really thought my career was in writing.’

She moved to New York and became a successful model. In 1980, she made her movie debut as an extra in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, dazzlingly Monroe-esque, planting a kiss on a train window. She moved to Hollywood and took lessons from the acting coach Roy London, who also taught Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jr.

In 1990, Paul Verhoeven cast her opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the science fiction classic Total Recall. When she discovered Verhoeven’s next film was about an enigmatic writer and murder suspect called Catherine Tramell, she was determined to get the part.

Twelve actors (including the top choice, Michelle Pfeiffer, as well as Geena Davis, Julia Roberts, Debra Winger and Kathleen Turner) are said to have turned down the role, which was regarded as risque and risky. Even when she started filming, Stone was convinced that producers were still looking for a replacement.

Basic Instinct was a huge success, becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of 1992 and taking more than $350million worldwide. LGBTQ+ campaigners picketed it because they believed the depiction of Tramell was homophobic – a rare high-profile lesbian or bisexual character in a blockbuster and a sociopath at best.

Critics scavenged over the film’s cultural carrion. Was it exploitative tack or a compelling exploration of sexuality and power?

And then there was that image. Or, at least, the idea of it. A split-second long – too short to fully register. Yet, somehow, almost seeing her vulva as she uncrossed her legs was more scandalous than simply seeing it.

Stone said she had been duped into the shot, writing in her memoir that she was asked to remove her underwear to prevent light reflection and told nothing revealing would be shown. She had no idea it would be used as it was.

Sharon attending the screening of Crimes Of The Future during the Cannes film festival in 2022

Appalled, she considered legal action against the filmmakers, but ultimately accepted the shot because it was true to Tramell’s character and artistic truth trumped personal humiliation.

Basic Instinct made Sharon Stone and, to an extent, destroyed her. Astonishingly, that one image came to define her. She’s still proud of the film and regards it as a great performance – one only she could have given.

The problem is, she says, casting directors deliberately conflated her with Tramell. ‘They said I was just like the character, like, somehow, they found someone who was just like that and she slipped into the clothes and it was magically recorded on film.

‘Not that it was a difficult part to play and that 12 other actresses of great fame and fortune turned it down. Then, as it played everywhere on the globe for the next 20 years, people started to go, ‘Do you think this really has anything to do with the fact that we thought we saw up her skirt?’ I think maybe it’s actually a pretty good performance.

‘So it went from me being nominated for a Golden Globe and people laughing when they called my name in the room to people giving me standing ovations and making me the woman of the year. People came to recognise: she’s not going away, the film’s not going away, the impact of the film is not going away.’

The film didn’t go away but Stone did. After Basic Instinct she made one great movie, turning in an outstanding performance as the damaged con artist Ginger

McKenna in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. And then, I begin to say…

She finishes the sentence for me. ‘And then I got nothing. I never got any more parts.’ Why? ‘I really wish you could tell me. Sometimes I think it was because I was too good.’ Stone is not averse to bigging herself up. Nor is she averse to a conspiracy theory. ‘Sometimes I think when you get nominated for an Academy Award and the greatest living actor on the planet doesn’t, that’s an imbalance in the male-female dynamic.’ Does she mean Robert De Niro, her Casino co-star? She nods, before suggesting it wasn’t De Niro that was upset but the powers that be.

Stone tells me about a party she was at with Hollywood’s glitterati before the Oscars ceremony. ‘We were in this very small room. Sidney Poitier was there, Woody Allen, everyone. Francis Coppola came up to me and he put a hand on my shoulder, like my dad used to when something really serious was about to happen. ‘And he said, ‘I need to tell you something… you’re not going to win the Oscar’. I went, ‘Why?’ And he went, ‘I didn’t win it for The Godfather and Marty [Martin Scorsese] didn’t win it for Raging Bull and you’re not going to win it for Casino.

‘My mother was desperately afraid that when she died her mother and father would be there. She didn’t want to see them, because they were so awful,’ says Sharon

‘And what you have to do as an actress is remember you are not a regular actress, you are an opera singer. You will lose with Marty and you will lose with me, but you will always be in our losers’ circle’.’

She finally allows herself a smile. ‘So that is what I have carried through my life – that I am a big fat loser like Marty and Francis Ford Coppola.’

It’s hard to know why Stone didn’t get offered the roles she deserved after Casino, although, aside from the conspiracy theories, there were some other reasons.

In 2000, she and her second husband, Phil Bronstein, adopted Roan and she focused on motherhood. A year later, at 43, she had a near-fatal stroke. It’s a miracle she survived – she says her brain bled for nine days and doctors gave her a one per cent chance of survival. She had to relearn to walk, speak and read.

Incredibly, she made a full recovery, but offers of work dried up. ‘In those days, as a woman, if something happened to you, you were done,’ she says.

‘So even when I wanted to come back to work, it was like, ‘Sure, you can do four episodes of Law And Order’.’ How long did that last? ‘That went on and on and on and on and I made nothing. And it just eventually became impossible to work.’

She believes she has continued to be punished for Basic Instinct by the industry and in her private life. Stone says that when she and Bronstein divorced in 2004, the film played a significant role in her losing custody of Roan.

‘They had my eight-year-old on the stand at one point, asking him if they knew his mother did sex movies.’ She claims they reduced her to a soft pornography actor, then suggested that made her an unsuitable mother. She says the custody battle lasted 11 years, at which point she was finally given responsibility for Roan again. Nevertheless, at the end of her book, she thanks Bronstein and his wife ‘for finding a path to a whole, healthy and blending family with me. There is no greater gift’. As she says, she looks for the positive. In 2005, she adopted her second son, Laird, now 20, as a single parent, followed by her third son, 19-year-old Quinn, a year later.

With no quality film work coming in, she focused on the art forms she had loved as a child – writing and painting. Her gorgeous impressionist and abstract expressionist paintings now sell for tens of thousands of dollars. The titles (Quaaludes, Hoisted on My Own Petard, If We Make It) could be short stories. Since Basic Instinct 2 in 2006 – much disparaged by critics and which she called ‘a piece of sh*t’ – Stone has made few movies of note.

But things are changing. This month, she’s back with Nobody 2, about a nobody, played by Bob Odenkirk, who turns out to be a top assassin. ‘Now, I’m making good films. I was good in Nobody 2 and I know it.’

Why is she so often cast as a villain? ‘I think very beautiful, smart people are perceived in very specific ways. Because I’m a woman who is beautiful, it’s easier to have me not be emotionally intelligent.’

Actually, I say, one of my favourite films of hers is one in which she is kind. In The Mighty, she plays the mother of Kieran Culkin’s Freak, a 12-year-old with a terminal condition. She says it’s one of her favourites, too. ‘And you know why I got that film? Because I had a production deal with Harvey Weinstein and after years of him paying for my offices and my staff, he realised he wasn’t getting anything he was hoping for. And he turned around and said, ‘I’ve got this children’s book and I have to produce it’.’ She stops, briefly. ‘But I was not going to f*** Harvey Weinstein.’

Did he try it on with her?

‘Well, I’m not the girl he’s going to take into a hotel room naked and I’m not the girl he’s going to grab… but I am the girl he’s going to give a production deal to and going to get fed up with and give a children’s movie to deal with.’

Last question please, the publicist says. Perhaps she’s as exhausted as I am. Stone is over the top, a little unreliable, thoroughly immodest and rather magnificent.

Despite everything – the abuse, the stroke, the fallout from Basic Instinct, the losses – she says she has always been a glass-half-full kind of gal.

Actually, she says, even an empty glass can have its positives. ‘It can get refilled, right? Sometimes an empty glass is what you need.’

• Nobody 2 is in cinemas now
• A version of this article was previously published in the Guardian