Sharon Stone used to hunt for loose change in phone booths.
Sharon Stone was honoured by New York Women in Film and Television
The 65-year-old star has recalled her early days of arriving in New York as an aspiring actress "with [her] suitcase and 50 dollars" and told how she was regularly hunting for coins that could go towards paying the subway fare to take her home from auditions back to her cockroach-infested apartment.
Speaking as she was honoured by New York Women in Film and Television's annual Muse Awards, she said: “I walked up and down the streets and I checked every pay phone for change that was left in so that I could possibly take the subway instead of walking all the way back to Elizabeth and Houston, where I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up above a bakery in a studio apartment with my friend and … lots and lots of cockroaches.”
The 'Basic Instinct' actress remembered the early days of her career as being "very exciting and really hard", not least because at the time, “there were four members of Women in Film."
She added: "Four — that’s not a joke.”
Sharon also spoke of how uncomfortable and stressful shooting sex scenes used to be, and admitted she used to beg the one woman she'd find working on set to serve as her chaperone, so she's "really grateful" things have changed now.
She said: “When I would go to the set there would be 300 men, and my hair and makeup and dressers were men, when I was doing sex scenes. It was all men and me.
"And sometimes I could ask the wardrobe supervisor, who may be woman, if she wouldn’t mind staying on set while I did that.
"When they didn’t even clear the set for me to do that, and I could hear some actor screaming: ‘Can you get out of the way? I can’t even see her t*** across the room.’
“Well, things have changed, and there are women in film now, and I am really grateful."
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