Sharon Stone says she got paid $13.5million (£10.9m) less than Michael Douglas for Basic Instinct.
The Oscar-nominated Casino actress, 65, starred alongside 78-year-old Michael in 1992’s shock Paul Verhoeven’s erotic thriller, which made nearly $353m (£185m) at the box office largely thanks to audiences wanting to see her notorious leg-crossing scene.
Sharon told the New York Women In Film and Television’s 43rd annual Muse Awards lunch on Tuesday about landing a $500,000 (£404k) pay cheque for playing kinky killer author Catherine Trammel in the noir flick.
The star admitted: ‘Michael Douglas made $14m. Now, I was new. I was new and he was a very big star.’
She revealed her pay for the film to a crowd of mainly female film and TV executives and added she faced disrespect from a line producer on the film – who kept referring to her as Karen for the ‘entirety’ of the project.
Sharon said: ‘Even at the Governor’s Ball (after the Oscars), he still called me Karen!
‘And, I carried that humiliation really deeply within me – even though my name wasn’t on the poster.’
Sharon – who has an estimated $60m (£48.5m) fortune – told a Women’s Cancer Fund event on March 23 just days after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, that she had lost half her money in the recent financial crisis.
She revealed: ‘I just lost half my money to this banking thing and that doesn’t mean that I’m not here.’
The actress has repeatedly alleged she was tricked by RoboCop and Showgirls director Paul, 84, into stripping off her underwear for her famous Basic Instinct police interrogation scene, in which her psychotic bisexual character uncrosses her legs to briefly reveal her privates.
She said in her autobiography The Beauty of Living Twice she was told to remove her underwear as it was reflecting too much light but was assured her genitals could not be seen on camera.
Sharon also said at the GQ Awards in 2019 about the scene: ‘Some years ago I was sitting on a sound stage and my director said: “Can you hand me your underpants because we’re seeing them in the scene and you shouldn’t have underpants on, but we won’t see anything”.’
Paul shared with Empire Magazine in 2016 that the idea for the scene came from a party the director attended with a woman who was not wearing underwear.
He insisted he discussed the idea with Sharon before they shot the scene and she was ‘really excited by the idea’.
Basic Instinct follows the story of film follows San Francisco police detective Nick Curran – played by Michael Douglas – as he investigates the brutal murder of a wealthy rock star.
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