Sharon Stone: No one believed I had sex appeal

It's been 21 years since that scene in Basic Instinct, but Sharon Stone still radiates the kind of sex appeal that makes men go weak in the knees.

The actress is 55 and in her words "a grown-up woman with three children". Despite the ordinary life she insists she leads away from the set, Sharon continues to defy time in an extraordinary way.
She has shunned plastic surgery, yet looks as good as she did when she was revealing all on the big screen.

In her latest film, Lovelace, a biopic telling the story of 1970s porn star Linda Lovelace - Sharon leaves the sex scenes to her 27-year-old co-star Amanda Seyfried.

Sharon keeps herself covered up in dowdy clothes for the role of Lovelace's mother Dorothy Boreman.

It's rare to see her playing a mum but she says the part is much more her style than the sexy roles she is famed for.

She also reveals that at the start of her career no one believed she had sex appeal.

Sharon says: "People didn't think I was sexy or pretty, and Chuck, my manager for 30 years, would call me up and say 'You can't get that movie because they don't think that you are hot'.

"I'm such a bookworm - I'm always at home, shy, in my library, and it was like 'Oh my God, what am I going to do?' because I was always in big, black clothes and my glasses.

"Then my friend, Marilyn Grabowski, who was [photography] editor of Playboy, said, 'You should do a Playboy spread'. She said, 'If you tell people you are sexy they will think you are sexy, use your brain'.

"So we did this thing and people decided 'Oh, she's sexy'."

She laughs: "Then I got endlessly cast in the sexy parts and that was fantastic. Who doesn't want to be gorgeous, hot and sexy?"

But then I couldn't get any other kind of parts, and so it's taken until now to start getting these other kinds of parts, which are really fun.

People thought I was a sex symbol which to me is the most hilarious thing of all time. You should see me in the morning. It's really not that hot, honestly. I could live in my flannel pyjamas for ever. My father always used to say, 'If you don't get out of that flannel nightgown, nobody is ever going to marry you'."

She adds: "It's fun to play a character people don't even recognise me in. It was fun walking down the street and have my manager drive right by me and be like, 'Where is she?'."

A few years ago it would not have been a surprise to see Sharon cast as Linda Lovelace, the first porn mega star, who starred in 70s X-rated movie Deep Throat.