Sharon Stone became emotional while describing the point she realised her marriage had effectively ended, after she said she was prepared to have a bilateral mastectomy.
Looking back on the early 2000s, the Basic Instinct actor explained that a mammogram led to doctors finding two sizeable tumors in her breasts.
Stone told David Begnaud on The Person Who Believed in Me podcast that one tumor was “bigger than her left breast,” and that a doctor later visited her with a stark recommendation: a “bilateral mastectomy,” meaning the removal of both breasts.
She recalled the physician explaining that, in many cases, ‘when they’re all the way up into here,’ while gesturing toward the shoulder area, doctors can be confident it’s cancer ‘before they go in.’ Stone said she responded: “I don’t have cancer.”
Despite her doubts, Stone said she was still ready to go ahead, telling the host she wasn’t ‘f*****g around’. She added that her husband at the time reacted angrily to the plan.
According to Stone, her then-partner called the idea of removing both breasts “ridiculous,” before standing up and walking out.
“He was furious. And the doctor said to him, ‘If I had more patients like her, we’d have more women alive today. You need to sit down.
“I said, ‘I make the decisions, not you.’ That was the end of the marriage,” she said.
Stone said it was clear to her in that moment that the relationship had ended. “You could just tell.”
She continued: “He thought I was ridiculous, he thought I was foolish, he thought I was making too many decisions myself,” she said.
Stone did not identify her husband during the interview. She has, however, been married twice.
She first married film director and producer Michael Greenburg in 1984, and they later divorced in 1987.
Her second marriage was to journalist Phil Bronstein, lasting from 1998 until 2004.
Stone later learned the tumors were benign. As a result, she did not go through with a double mastectomy, though she did have an operation to remove the growths.
Elsewhere in the conversation, she also spoke about a violent incident that left her with a broken ribcage.
“I don’t know how much I can tell about this. I was hit from behind. I was unconscious on the floor. The two couches were sideways. The coffee table was all over the place. It was sort of upside down. Everything that had been on the coffee table was all over the floor and I didn’t know how I got there,” she said, without naming the attacker.