Sharon Stone Opens Up About Her Near Death Experience, Me Too & Her Hollywood Career | GMB

uh hollywood legend sharon stone is known for her iconic movie roles glamour and beauty and intelligence and but in her new book the beauty of living twice she describes herself as a survivor in her memoirs sharon reveals details of her childhood of poverty there are revelations about hollywood her me too encounters along the way and she joins us for an exclusive interview the book is called the beauty of living twice and sharon stone joins us this morning very good morning to you it's it's lovely to see you i think it's not even morning yet is it where you are no it's it's night time here yeah nice to see you thank you so much for joining us sharon it's a very it's a beautiful book uh it's a very inspiring book at times is very painful um you're incredibly honest in it and it is rather raw in places but overall it's a book about positivity and it begins with this remarkable event 20 years ago now i think to the year where you suffered a stroke um you describe it as like a gunshot to the head or like a lightning bolt and it was such a shocking event that it sort of gave you an opportunity to really reassess everything in your life didn't it tell us about that life-changing moment for you well it's not really a moment when something like that happens i mean in my case i had a massive brain hemorrhage um but i think that anyone who has a big event whether it's a cancer or even a big divorce or losing your job losing your home uh any big crisis and and you know we've all this last year we've all been through a giant crisis we've been through covet and many of us have lost someone dear to us or more than one person dear to us many people have lost their jobs and certainly we've all suffered loss of wages and the inability to see our friends and family and all of this is quite traumatic i think when one goes through a big trauma these are not just like an instant thing even though the moment may be instant the moment when you have in my case uh a bri brain bleed or the moment someone tells you you have cancer or you're getting divorced all these are seem to happen in a moment but but this these periods of change and growth take time and the comprehension of grief and the process of change takes time and certainly my examination of what happened to me and how my life changed and even why this happened to me was something that took a considerable amount of time and writing about it also took a couple of years i mean you know sharon reading your book the message that i kept on getting from all of it was was compassion the amount of compassion that you've you've had and you've experienced since this since this moment since this life-changing moment for you but there's been a number of moments in your life i mean i pleaded people to go and read the book it's extraordinary what you've been through from a from a young girl in pennsylvania uh and your brother had been caught up in the wrong crowd and then so you were sent because it'd be better for you you were sent to new york to be an actress and i think what's really interesting is that you don't come from an acting background you don't have family members who were already in hollywood you you did this your own so this grit and this strength has always been there for you hasn't it well i come from a pretty tough family um my mother was an amazingly uh resilient woman who came from just abject poverty um the kind of poverty where her mother walked five miles a day to get a ticket worth 50 cents to feed her many children and my mother was given away when she was nine years old to become another family's live-in maid uh laundress and cook and you know she never had a childhood and she was married at 16 had my brother at 17. fortunately she and my father really did love each other very much and stayed happily very happily married for 60 years but my dad came from extreme wealth and they were oil drillers in a place called oil city pennsylvania which was really the beginning of the oil industry here and when he was a little boy his dad and his uncle were at an oil site and my grandfather went back to the house and just as he did the oil well blew and killed everyone and um in those days money did not go my grandfather died almost immediately and the money didn't go to women so all the money went to my 18 year old great uncle and my grandmother then was just without any means and uh with three little kids and so she became a nurse in an asylum and took her daughter and her two little boys went to live in people's barns and did chores and so neither of my parents grew up with parents yeah at all so they grew up completely unattended and were married when they were still little they were 16 and 17 when they got married um you know you you talk about your mother and you you mentioned there that she didn't have a childhood and you and that sort of affected your relationship i think a little bit with your mother and i think from my understanding you put it down to communication and but the line i i really take from the sort of the closing chapters is that you're now beginning the relationship with your mother and i think there's a lot of people will will really associate with that relationship with mums i think and that was i thought it was a really honest declaration from you in that book i think particularly from my generation as well although i do think this is a common a common theme but in my generation our parents were all depression-era folks and they had a particularly tough time and in their era no one talked about anything at all and so there wasn't any kind of even communication to discuss the difficulties they were going through then in our generation we were the generation that first began to try to fight for i need to plug in my computer [Laughter] hello you know each generation has their own new new understanding and hopefully better understanding of how to communicate and certainly i hoped while writing my book not only to discover myself but to be able to communicate through that discovery how we could all discover each other let's talk about your career uh you know an amazing career and and i just want to say first of all i think the biggest crime in your life was 1996 when he didn't win the oscar for casino i mean susan sounded a fantastic performance but that should have been yours i mean that was you know ginger that was just an incredible performance one of my favorite films um but of course that the film that everyone talks about uh was that moment for you was was basic instinct looking back at that now i mean you know i i urge everyone to read the book because it's fascinating uh you've mentioned how you were you felt duped at the time with that with that famous scene and uh and that i i talked about everything i really have to say about that in the book so i'm kind of i know that's not where i'm i'm at with that yeah i know i i i i i'm with you but i think it's quite interesting that what i like about that the whole moment with basically is that you've you've completely owned that moment despite what other people have had to say other people have debated about it you've completely owned it uh and then you talk about me too in that movement that is a really important issue for a lot of people now but you say this has been going on for some time and you've had a quite an interesting way of dealing with that where you've just been able to say no just tell us a little bit about that first of all i don't think that me too is a hollywood issue i don't think that sexual abuse is a hollywood issue i think it begins in homes both rich and poor i think that the lack of communication is certainly a global one i think that rape kits need to be processed i think that elementary schools nursery schools need to have places where kids can say how they feel and what's going on and that educated people need to be installed in all schools i think we need to have better communication in courtrooms about how we treat victims of these kind of crimes i feel that we need to understand the differences between felonies and misdemeanors i believe that think tanks need to be made so that we have a better understanding of what all of this means and that we can address it more fruitfully more thoughtfully and more compassionately in the legal system i i think that we are um you know just impoverished in our understanding of how to address these issues and you address many of them in the book it's the beauty of living twice um one of the things sharon stone um about your experience 20 years ago you were just given a 1 chance of survival you said that you made a choice to recover um you had an experience where well i don't i don't want to reproduce it in my words but you almost sort of saw angels didn't you and the angel at the end of your bed and there was a sort of sense that they were drawing you at one moment and suddenly you were jolted back to reality um it was such a remarkable experience such a remarkable uh recovery can you just explain a little bit more about that choice to stay alive in that moment and how that's informed the rest of your life i see i think you're discussing my i had a near-death experience um and people discuss these in many ways they discuss them from a scientific uh perspective and discuss them also from a spiritual perspective i believe that they're both um in my case when this happened to me i had all of these things that most people talk about where you see this kind of uh light that you leave your body that you have this feeling of being pulled outward and upward i had a sense of seeing um people that had gone before me i had a sense of communicating with them in um sort of in a femoral sense uh not really with dialogue per se but i did have a sense of understanding that we were communicating and then um suddenly i had this gigantic pain you know like i'd been kicked in the chest now i do not know if i was defibrillated or if this is just how it happened with me but then i was back in the room uh and it was very clear that i had chosen to be back in the room uh and not chosen to continue on that journey that outward upward away journey um i think that's really all i can say that would describe it i mean it's it's an absolutely remarkable experience and it was not long after you recovered from that that you then appeared on stage at the oscars and people saw you dancing there with john travolta and i think what people didn't understand probably at the time was that you weren't even confident about walking very much let alone being twirled around on a stage yeah a significant moment for you doing that at the oscars yes and john i hadn't told john what happened to me um but he's a the most remarkably wonderful human being he's the most thoughtful kind um highly conscious person and he and i have a very dear friendship and a and that special kind of communication where you just kind of know if you need to give each other a call um and when he we we came to rehearsal the day before and i asked him what he wanted to do how he wanted to go down and everything and then did he want to do something did he want to dance did he want to do something special he said i didn't know you know and then that night he came and i was sitting on a steamer trunk backstage and he came over and he looked at my dress and he goes oh that's a good dancing dress that dress really and i was twirls yeah you guys will show me show me how it twirls and he was fooling around with me backstage but he didn't tell me we were going to do anything and so i was as surprised as everyone else when i came out and we started dancing but it was so exciting for me because you know i was still really deeply in my recovery and you know i was just at the stage where i had just kind of put one foot in front of the other and i was still working through a lot of stuff and my hearing still wasn't quite right and sometimes i could see out of my right eye and sometimes i couldn't you know i just you know it was one of those things where i never knew quite what was going to happen and it all worked out so it was like a good day and i didn't fall off the stage or anything it was a beautiful moment sharon the book i think the book is very timely uh you know not obviously just for you and and your it's your book but for for everybody emerging from what has happened over the past year because it's a book about perspective it's a book about making choices making positive choices um it's a book about reclaiming control everyone has just been through hell exactly right dealing with loss you know just and and and how you look back at the things that you've done in your life and and how you look forward as you say the beauty of living twice i think it's it's it's beautifully written and it's got lots of important life lessons for all of us um and just finally how has lockdown been for you and how is the situation there in la right now well i'm locked down with a 15 16 and 21 year old girl i can relate to that because that's pretty much how my lockdown was as well there was a lot of lego uh i have to say right and there's a lot of pajamas and there's a lot of you know food and dishes and stuff everywhere and i can see it you're not the best housekeeper in town i can tell you that much but you you have one of us with you as well you have an english bulldog don't you looking after you and keeping you company i have two bulldogs but i hate to say it they're french and i know you guys are fighting right now so i think i hate to say the word but you know we are we'll just pretend they're english that's fine yes you've picked aside you've picked aside um sharon it's absolutely lovely to see you is there a secret to looking so fabulous that you can share with us i just for me you know i believe in the body mind and spirit of it all and you know if they're things that like aren't working for you stop doing it do you know what sharon that's easier said than done it's absolutely lovely to see you thanks so much for joining us this morning sharon stone thank you very much for having me i really really appreciate it and if i might i'd just like to do a quick shout out to adele yeah love you guys say that again sharon who was i want to do a quick shout out to adele and jill my two best friends who were there in england love you oh okay was it was is the ear thing uh is that a little is that a personal thing the ear thing is a little hello it's a little hello to my two best friends oh lovely okay well if adele and joe are listening get in touch um sharon stone thank you so much um it's a really inspiring book uh jeff want to go and get it here is the beauty of living twice remarkable remarkable life remarkable woman yeah she's looking very sunny

Channel: Good Morning Britain

Views: 95,856

Rating: 4.6894979 out of 5

Keywords: good morning britain, breakfast show, news, morning news, gmb, good morning britain interview, itv, susanna reid, Talk Shows - Topic

Id: 9l7-0u9zScc

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021