Sharon Vonne Stone (born March 10, 1958) is an American actress. Known for primarily playing femmes fatales and women of mystery on film and television, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1990s. She is the recipient of various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a nomination for an Academy Award. She was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2005 (Commander in 2021).

After modeling in television commercials and print advertisements, Stone made her film debut as an extra in Stardust Memories (1980) and played her first speaking part in the horror film Deadly Blessing (1981). In the 1980s, she appeared in such films as Irreconcilable Differences (1984), King Solomon's Mines (1985), Action Jackson (1988), and Above the Law (1988). She had a breakthrough with her part in Paul Verhoeven's science fiction film Total Recall (1990), before rising to international recognition when she portrayed Catherine Tramell in Verhoeven's erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992), for which she earned her first Golden Globe Award nomination.

Stone's performance as a trophy wife in Martin Scorsese's crime drama Casino (1995) earned her a Golden Globe Award along with a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her other notable films include Sliver (1993), The Specialist (1994), The Quick and the Dead (1995), Catwoman (2004), Broken Flowers (2005), Alpha Dog (2006), Bobby (2006), Fading Gigolo (2013), The Disaster Artist (2017), Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019), and The Laundromat (2019).

On television, Stone has featured in the ABC miniseries War and Remembrance (1987), the HBO television film If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), Steven Soderbergh's Mosaic (2017) and Ryan Murphy's Ratched (2020). She made guest appearances in The Practice (2004) and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2010), winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the former.

Sharon Vonne Stone was born on March 10, 1958, in Meadville, Pennsylvania, to Methodist parents Dorothy Marie (née Lawson), an accountant, and Joseph William Stone II, a tool and die manufacturer and former factory worker. She has three siblings. She is mostly of Scots-Irish and English descent. She has some Irish ancestry. In a 2013 interview with Conan O'Brien, she stated that her Irish ancestors arrived in the United States during the Great Famine. She has a reported IQ of 154. Stone was considered academically gifted as a child and entered the second grade when she was five years old. Stone said that she and her sister were both sexually abused as children by their maternal grandfather, in an interview to The New York Times in March 2021, while promoting her memoir The Beauty of Living Twice. At 14, her neck was badly injured while breaking a horse when the animal bucked as it charged toward a washing line.

She graduated from Saegertown High School in Saegertown, Pennsylvania, in 1975. Stone was admitted to Edinboro State College on a creative writing scholarship at age 15, but quit college and moved to New York City to become a fashion model. Inspired by Hillary Clinton, in 2016 Stone went back to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania to complete her degree.

While attending Edinboro State College, Stone won the title of Miss Crawford County, Pennsylvania, and in 1976, was a candidate for Miss Pennsylvania. One of the pageant judges told her to quit college and move to New York City to become a fashion model. Stone left Meadville and moved in with an aunt in New Jersey, and by 1977, she had been signed by Ford Modeling Agency in New York City. She soon moved to Europe, living for a year in Milan and then in Paris. While living there, she decided to quit modeling and pursue acting. "So I packed my bags, moved back to New York, and stood in line to be an extra in a Woody Allen movie", she later recalled. At 20, Stone was cast for a brief role in Allen's dramedy Stardust Memories (1980) and had a speaking part a year later in the horror film Deadly Blessing (1981).

French director Claude Lelouch cast Stone in the musical epic Les Uns et les Autres (1982), starring James Caan, but she was on screen for two minutes and did not appear in the credits. She secured guest-spots on the television series Silver Spoons (1982), Bay City Blues (1983), Remington Steele (1983), Magnum, P.I. (1984), and T. J. Hooker (1985); played a starlet who breaks up the marriage of a successful director and his screenwriter wife in the drama Irreconcilable Differences (1984), opposite Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long and a young Drew Barrymore; and starred as a resourceful woman teaming up with a fortune hunter (played by Richard Chamberlain) in the action-centered King Solomon's Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986), a light, comedic take on the Indiana Jones film series, which were poorly received by critics and audiences. In his review for King Solomon's Mines, Walter Goodman of The New York Times considered that Stone was "up to date as a spunky, sexy, smart-talking heroine with an effective right hook" but felt that the story was "lost in the effects". For her performance in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, she received her first Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Actress.