Sharon Stone has opened up about the debilitating stroke she suffered and the harrowing aftermath that led to people taking “advantage” of her and leaving her with “zero money.”
In 2001, the then-43-year-old Basic Instinct star was rushed to the hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage that lasted for nine days.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview, Stone detailed how the stroke changed everything.
“A Buddhist monk told me that I had been reincarnated into my same body,” she recalled.
“I had a death experience and then they brought me back. I bled into my brain for nine days, so my brain was shoved to the front of my face. It wasn’t positioned in my head where it was before,” she said.
“And while that was happening, everything changed,” she explained. “My sense of smell, my sight, my touch. I couldn’t read for a couple of years. Things were stretched and I was seeing color patterns. A lot of people thought I was going to die.”
It took Stone, now 66, seven years to fully recover from the medical incident, and in that time, she said: “People took advantage of me.”
“I had $18m saved because of all my success, but when I got back into my bank account, it was all gone. My refrigerator, my phone – everything was in other people’s names,” Stone shared. “I had zero money.”
However, instead of hanging onto any “bitterness or anger,” she said she “decided to stay present and let go.”
“If you bite into the seed of bitterness, it never leaves you. But if you hold faith, even if that faith is the size of a mustard seed, you will survive,” Stone added. “So, I live for joy now. I live for purpose.”
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Before the stroke, Stone was one of the biggest actors of the Eighties and Nineties, with leading roles in blockbusters such as Total Recall, The Quick and the Dead, and Casino.
While she has appeared in films including Catwoman, Lovelace and The Laundromat in the years since her stroke, her career has not returned to the heights of her peak in fame.
Stone has previously spoken about the impact her stroke had on her career. “I lost my place in the business,” she said in 2015. “I was like the hottest movie star, you know? It was like Miss Princess Diana and I were so famous – and she died and I had a stroke. And we were forgotten.
“You find yourself at the back of the line in your business, as I did,” she lamented. “You have to figure yourself out all over again.”