Mark Abrahams/Harper's BAZAARSharon Stone is reclaiming her life, her career and her body, and she's—quite literally—putting her effort on display for Harper's Bazaar.
The 57-year-old model-turned-actress absolutely stuns in her nude photo shoot for the magazine, proving that not only does she still "got it," but also shows how far she has come since suffering a terrible cerebral hemorrhage in 2001. The blond bombshell flaunts her fit figure wearing only heels and has never looked happier.
It hasn't been easy getting to this point.
Following her medical crisis, Stone's marriage fell apart and she lost custody of her adopted son Roan. She also walked away from the hospital not knowing how to read, making her job of memorizing lines that much more difficult. One low point involved a guest-starring role on Law & Order, in which she couldn't remember her lines. The Basic Instinct actress says that was her wake up call.
But nothing was going to stop her from staging an epic comeback.
"I thought, 'You know what? I got thrown off the bullet train, and now I'm going to have to crawl up a hill of broken glass, get back on the train that's going a million miles an hour, and work my way from the cattle car up,'" she tells the magazine. "'That's just the way it is, so I'd better get humble and shut the f--k up and do the job. Because if I can't do this job, I'm certainly not going to be able to do anything else.'"
Although she has spoken briefly about her brain hemorrhage in the past, the Agent X star opens up to the magazine about everything she went through that year and the subsequent years. She recalls not feeling well three days before checking herself into the hospital, where she soon lost consciousness after suffering a stroke.
"When I came to, the doctor was leaning over me. I said, 'Am I dying?' And he said, 'You're bleeding into your brain,'" she recollects. "I said, 'I should call my mom,' and he said, 'You're right. You could lose the ability to speak soon.'"
It turned out that she was "hemorrhaging so much that my brain had been pushed into the front of my face." It took the actress years to fully recover but even now she still feels after effects of her brain damage. "It almost feels like my entire DNA changed. My brain isn't sitting where it used to, my body type changed, and even my food allergies are different," she says.
But there have been some upsides. "I became more emotionally intelligent. I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind. Now I'm stronger. And I can be abrasively direct," she explains. "That scares people, but I think that's not my problem. It's like, I have brain damage; you'll just have to deal with it."
Her "abrasive" directness also applies to the way she views her body—and this nude shoot.
"I'm aware that my ass looks like a bag of flapjacks," she jokes to the magazine. "But I'm not trying to be the best-looking broad in the world. At a certain point you start asking yourself, 'What really is sexy?' It's not just the elevation of your boobs. It's being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that's with you. If I believed that sexy was trying to be who I was when I did Basic Instinct, then we'd all be having a hard day today."