Stone was born the second child of blue-collar parents in small-town Pennsylvania in 1958. A precocious, not to say brilliant, child, she entered college on a scholarship at age 15 to study creative writing. After performing a dramatic rendition of the Gettysburg Address at a local fair, the bright young woman came to the attention of beauty pageant promoters. It was eventually decided that she didn't possess the requisite malleable personality to succeed at the beauty-queen racket, and someone suggested that she try modeling instead, a profession, it is presumed, in which complicating matters of intelligence and character don't get in the way. Stone's family, to its credit, had her back; her dad, she has said proudly, "never raised me to believe that being a woman inhibited any of my choices or my possibilities to succeed." As for Stone's homemaker mother Dorothy, she cherished a hope that her gifted daughter could escape mediocrity and get out into the big world.

Modeling certainly did that for Stone, but it also bored her to tears, so she started undertaking small acting jobs on the side. Her first film role of any note was a fleeting, and admittedly undemanding, turn as a pretty woman in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980). From there, Stone embarked on a lengthy series of weensy roles in worse-than-so-so movies in which she purportedly did not overly endear herself to crews and fellow cast members. After a good ten years of schlock like Bolero, Police Academy 4, and Action Jackson, she made the most of her butt-kicking role as Arnold Schwarzenegger's "wife" in Total Recall (1990). The part attracted a modicum of good notice, and she further stoked the publicity train's engines by posing for a nude pictorial in Playboy, thereby ensuring a heaping helping of Tinseltown notoriety.

About that same time, the director and producers of a psychological thriller called Basic Instinct (1992) were casting about for an actress to play the tasty lead role of bisexual wacko killer Catherine Tramell. They considered Michelle Pfeiffer (!) and Julia Roberts (!!) for the part before Stone's name came up. The part was as good as hers when she showed up for the reading with her hair styled becomingly in a French twist and dressed in a stunning Grace Kelly suit. The film's now-infamous interrogation scene, in which Stone uncrosses and recrosses her legs, revealing to the world just what didn't come between her and her tight dress, clinched her reputation as a bad-girl actress.

After Basic Instinct, Stone became one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, with parts coming fast and furious, even if they were primarily of the sex-tramp variety. She undressed again in the much-anticipated Sliver, but even her lovely form couldn't help the doomed picture's abysmal reception. Stone had succeeded in carving out an attention-grabbing Hollywood persona, to be sure, but she had also worked hard at learning the craft of acting, having undergone many years of serious dramatic study — and she wanted the kind of straight parts that would challenge her talent. Tough, confident, glamorous in an Old Hollywood sort of way, and above all smart (it is said that she quickly assesses the intelligence of each interviewer, and adjusts her behavior accordingly; she once sat through a New York Times interview chatting blithely on about Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged — while wearing a see-through blouse), Stone commandeered the brush when it came to painting her own starlet image.

That the actress' tenacity was starting to pay off became apparent when she won a starring role opposite Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's 1995 film Casino; she applied herself assiduously to perfecting her honest portrayal of opportunistic hustler Ginger, impressing the film's crew and A-list cast with her professionalism and commitment, and earning a long sought-after Oscar nomination and the respect that goes along with it for her efforts. Riding high on her Academy approval, Stone started her own production company, and, with director Sam Raimi, made The Quick and the Dead, a quirky Western that promptly keeled over at the box office.

Although some of Stone's mid-'90s efforts did not perform well commercially or critically in this country — witness the truly terrible death-row drama Last Dance — her struggles to maintain her credibility have not been in vain. She has proved bankable internationally, largely due to the fact that she is actively involved in overseas promotional efforts for her movies; and she has managed to turn in a number of highly creditable performances — though she continues to get mired down in the occasional cinematic bog. Her recent offerings have fallen somewhere uncomfortably in the middle: She sketched a heartfelt and unglamorous characterization of a harried mother whose young son suffers from a rare disease in the overweeningly sentimental family drama The Mighty; played a tough-talking moll who becomes the unwitting and reluctant savior of a boy threatened by the mob in the ill-advised Gloria; mugged her way shamelessly through Albert Brooks' snarky Hollywood spoof The Muse; and appeared in British theater director Matthew Warchus' laborious screen adaptation of the Sam Shepard play Simpatico.

Stone resolutely maintains a gracious attitude toward her stardom. She has said she doesn't understand the pained, petulant way some Hollywood stars consign themselves to their fate; she herself feels grateful. Her personal life has also reached a happy and romantic resolution: After a spate of unlikely boyfriends and a couple of powerful mogul-type husbands, Stone married newspaper editor Phil Bronstein on Valentine's Day 1998. The couple resides in California, and adopted a baby boy, Roan, in 2000.