Happy birthday, Sharon Stone!
The Basic Instinct actress turns 65 today, and she definitely deserves to have a good day given what she’s been through this past year.
Just a month ago, Stone’s younger brother Patrick died from a heart attack at the age of 57.
“We did lose my brother Patrick Joseph Stone to a heart attack yesterday,” she said in an Instagram tribute the day after his passing. “Like any family, we thank you for your love and support in this time of immeasurable grief and we appreciate all of your condolences. Yes, we’ve had a tremendous amount of loss in these last couple of years, as so many of you also have. And we do greatly understand that the losses are ours here on Earth, and I thank you very much for the love and support that you’re showing us, and we just ask you to continue to be kind. Thank you.”
Her brother’s death came just two years after Patrick’s 11-month-old son, River, died from multiple organ failure. At the time, the Stone family was grieving, but able to take solace in the fact that River’s organ donation was able to save three lives, “two infants and a 45-year-old man”.
“I can only say that you never, never know when a tragedy will happen in your life or in your family, but this opportunity to be an organ donor, it saved us, saved our family,” she said in a statement at the time.
In addition to her brother’s untimely death, she also has recently opened up about other difficulties she went through in her life, including the struggles of her custody battle over her adopted son, Roan.
In an interview earlier this week with iHeartRadio’s Table for Two podcast, she shared how her explicit scenes in the 1992 film Basic Instinct were used against her in her custody battle against Phil Bronstein.
“When the judge asked my child – my tiny little boy, ‘Do you know your mother makes s*x movies?’ Like, this kind of abuse by the system – that I was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie,” she shared.
In the end, she lost custody of Roan with visitation rights. Because of this, she suffered severe physical and mental health challenges.
She was hospitalized the same year for cardiac problems, a time that she says, “literally broke my heart”. Now that she can reflect on what she went through, and the major changes that have occurred for TV nowadays and its more relaxed regulations of explicit content, she’s that much more frustrated with the fact that her brief explicit scenes are what led to her losing custody of her son.
“People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now and you saw maybe like a sixteenth of a second of possible nudity of me – and I lost custody of my child,” she said. “Are you kidding?”
Regardless of her hardships, she seems to be moving forward as best she can. Wishing her a very happy birthday today and hopefully some time to spend with family as they can all have an excuse to escape and put their focus more on the people who are still here and share gratitude for that idea.
Sources:
https://people.com/movies/patrick-stone-brother-of-sharon-stone-dead-at-57/
