Bad hairdo, wrinkles for Sharon Stone

Bad hairdo, wrinkles for Sharon Stone

Hollywood sex symbol Sharon Stone traded in her usual glamour and good looks for wrinkled skin and a bad hairdo to play the mother of 1970s porn star Linda Lovelace.

While many might find her unrecognisable in the biopic Lovelace, the 55-year-old says she wanted an even more drastic transformation.

"We tried all kinds of things because the original Dorothy Boreman was heavier. We tried a heavier, fatter bodysuit and so on, but we started to feel like it was becoming too costume-ish," she says in a telephone interview with Life! from Los Angeles.

The film's two directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, encouraged her to channel the role internally, so she did away with the bodysuit.

"They're such great directors, really marvellous directors. They suggested I push for the performance and not worry so much about how I looked, that I find the character from within."

Lovelace, which is showing in cinemas, tells the story of American adult actress Linda Boreman, better known by her stage name Linda Lovelace. Amanda Seyfried plays the late titular character, whose abusive husband got her into sleaze.

Stone plays her domineering mother. Despite being set in the 1970s and 1980s, she stresses that the film is "timely" and "poignant" because of its themes of exploitation and abuse.

"I think abuse continues to this day all over the world and this film is just one particular case that is a metaphor for the bigger issues we are facing," she adds.

Polite and friendly throughout, she says: "One of the key reasons I wanted to do this film and... play this part was to be the fulcrum of the woman who was locked in so deeply that she wasn't even aware that it was happening."

Linda eventually denounced her past and became a spokesman for the anti-pornography movement.

Stone compares Lovelace to 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct, the film that catapulted her to fame. Both films, she says, tapped into "the heat of the moment". Her memorable role as an alleged serial killer in that movie sealed her status as one of Hollywood's biggest sex symbols.

Stone, a former model who started acting in the early 1980s, has won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her role as a mobster's wife in the 1995 crime drama Casino.

While she acknowledges that it is "easier for people to enjoy me disappearing into more glamorous roles", she is glad that her physical transformation in Lovelace helps draw people to the cinema.

Before taking on the role, she was not familiar with Lovelace's story and knew only what she heard from "cultural chatter". So she turned to the Internet for research. "That's the wonderful thing about the Internet. You can find anything, pictures, excerpts from the book, everything," she says.

"Tento 15 years ago when you were playing a real-life character, you had to go to the library, you had to get documents, films. It was such a gruelling and laborious situation. Now it's so much easier."

She is full of praise for Epstein and Friedman, the pair behind critically acclaimed films such as Howl (2010), based on American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and 1989 Aids documentary film Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt, which won them an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

"I love what they have done, I love the integrity of their oeuvre," she says.

She had similarly kind words for 27-year-old Seyfried, who regards her as a mentor. "She is so good and she is at that very intriguing age of blossoming. It's like when you are seeing a caterpillar start to turn into a butterfly because you see the work as that beauty is emerging. It's just terrific."

Stone, who was married twice, says she is now picky with her roles and prefers to spend more time with her three adopted sons, aged 13, eight and seven. She is currently single.

Her work championing causes such as Aids research also keeps her busy.

Last month, the Casting Society of America and the Lady Film-makers Film Festival gave her the Humanitarian and Career Achievement Spotlight Award.

"I have three kids who are such a priority in my life. I don't want to go away from them for no valuable reason," she says.

"I'm very engaged in my humanitarian endeavours and at a certain level, you don't want to play some silly part when you can be doing something good that can actually save a life. I have other things that have more value and meaning to me and I don't want to be foolish about my time."

While her wrinkles in Lovelace might be exaggerated, Stone says she has no plans to enhance her natural beauty with surgery.

"People try to talk me into it but I don't need it right now, honestly."

dinohadi@sph.com.sg


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