Sharon Stone

Sharon Stone's first appearance on film was a few silent seconds in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories in 1980, playing a woman on a passing train. What followed was twelve years of work that never quite arrived - television, thrillers, parts written to be decorative. Total Recall in 1990 was the first genuine lift, mostly because Paul Verhoeven let her be dangerous rather than ornamental. He remembered that when he came to cast his next film, and everything about her career changed accordingly.

Basic Instinct opened in 1992 and became one of those films people argued about in newspapers. Catherine Tramell is a novelist who may be a murderer and is certainly in control of every room she enters, and Stone played her without any of the apology the part could have invited. It brought a Golden Globe nomination and an enormous amount of coverage, most of it focused on one interrogation scene rather than on the performance surrounding it.

Sliver followed in 1993 and confirmed the risk of the position - she was now being offered the same film repeatedly. The escape came in 1995, in the same year as The Quick and the Dead. Martin Scorsese cast her as Ginger McKenna in Casino, a hustler who marries into money and disintegrates across three hours. It won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama and her only Academy Award nomination, and it remains the answer to anyone who assumed she was simply well cast in 1992.

The then-and-now comparison for Stone is complicated by something that had nothing to do with film. In September 2001 she suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage that took years to recover from, at exactly the point a career of that size needs constant maintenance. She won a Primetime Emmy in 2004 for a guest run on The Practice, but the momentum did not return. The photographs from 1992 show a woman being sold as a phenomenon. The later ones show someone who survived it, which is rarer.