Sharon Stone, a rare combo of beauty and brains who built a $50 million fortune from scratch, remains in demand for film and television projects at age 64. However, the story of her tumultuous childhood — especially her brother’s criminal career and its aftermath — is barely known. 

Sharon, 64, opened up about her “cataclysmic” upbringing and how her brother Michael Stone, 71, despite his good looks and charisma, became a major drug dealer and brought misery and the threat of violence to those around him. The ‘Basic Instinct’ star was seen in four-and-a-half hours of raw, uncensored footage, obtained by the Daily Mail, chiming in on her past and how it helped propel her to stardom. At one point, she even confronts her brother about his drug dealing and its “catastrophic consequences.”

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Sharon has never spoken out about her childhood, which she deemed too personal and too painful to be discussed in public. However, she and her brother felt it was time the world knew their unique rags-to-riches story. She explained how the family was so poor that her mother had been given away to a dentist’s family aged nine “so she could have a better life than she had, living in a terrible two-room shack… They lived right on the tracks, you could reach out and touch the train.”

Meanwhile, their father Joe worked in a “tool and die” factory, spending his days in sweltering conditions while casting steel car parts from molten metal. Sharon remembered, “Men in their asbestos suits, those helmets with flaps down over the shoulders and glass in front of the eyes lifting huge pots of fiery ore… a liquid that made me feel like I was looking into hell.”

Who is Sharon Stone’s brother?

The Stone siblings had no choice but to work hard and make a decent life for themselves. “It was a bizarrely strict family,” Sharon recalled. “The boundaries were really strict and the punishments were severe.” Sharon and Michael have two more siblings — brother Patrick, now 55, and sister Kelly, now 50 — and they were “all expected to work,” Michael said. “I had a paper round. Sharon and I had to earn our keep from a very young age,” he explained.

Michael said he would bring Sharon along on his round, even making her a small muslin bag that carried just one newspaper. He noted their age gap at the time — he was ten and she was barely three — but “she wanted to be with me.” Michael continued, “I wanted anything, I had to buy it myself with the money I earned. Sharon was the same. Sharon flipped burgers at McDonald’s. We built fences, mowed lawns, and shoveled snow, anything to earn a dime.” Meanwhile, Sharon remembered how their grandmother Lela taught her how to steal things from restaurant tabletops. “Grandma Lela’s house was filled with hotel china from all over the place,” she said. “She had silver salt and pepper shakers. It was about survival.”

Michael enlisted in the US Navy at age 18, and that’s when he was introduced to illegal drugs. It started when he was convalescing in a naval hospital after having ripped his finger off in an accident while repairing machinery. “I first smoked marijuana in the naval hospital,” he recalled. “The Vietnam War was going on. We were in these long wards and around 6 o’clock at night the Navy [guards] would leave and everyone would fire up and start smoking joints. I’d go to the bathroom and there’d be a guy in there firing up heroin. So that’s where I first smoked a joint and then throughout the military we got high, almost everybody did.”

Michael would be discharged in 1973 at age 22, around the same time his marriage to his childhood lover broke apart. He soon found himself trafficking and dealing in Marijuana. He was earning $60,000 a month but his family soon started facing the ramifications, often in the form of violence. “All hell started breaking loose,” Sharon recalled. “People were getting shot and beaten up. They thought it would be safer to get me out of there. So Mum and Dad let me leave and pursue my dreams in New York.”

While Sharon was making leaps in Hollywood, her brother was already masterminding an operation worth millions of dollars by the end of the 1970s. He was reportedly smuggling major quantities of drugs out of Belgium, hiding them in secret compartments in furniture. While his sister was on her road to stardom, Michael was hiding in motel rooms with guns by his bedside.

In 1981, he started trafficking cocaine and would soon be dealing with the Colombians. The violence escalated dramatically and he was eventually arrested by the FBI in December that year with 2lbs of cocaine and drug paraphernalia. Sharon confronted her brother in the interview. “It was so terrifying for all of us. Didn’t you use crystal meth? Quite frankly, we felt like you were our worst enemy,” she told Michael. “When it’s happening within a family you are really torn because this is the guy who made me my own single muslin bag so I could carry one paper and go on your paper route with you when I was four or five,” Sharon bemoaned.

Aside from being perpetually cash strapped, the ‘Total Recall’ star has spoken in the past of feeling that her mother didn’t show much affection. She explained that despite oozing confidence on the outside, she was constantly plagued by insecurity. The actress attributed the feeling to a childhood wearing hand-me-down clothes and watching her parents struggle to make ends meet. “Mum and Dad came from such a distorted family upbringing with Mum in such incredible poverty. There was such madness in her family. And Dad with alcoholism. Neither of them finished school,” Sharon explained. “So they were the family that was going to pull it together, no matter what. There was a lot of fear behind it. [Our parents] came from everything being a s*** show.”

However, Sharon’s parents inadvertently ingrained the same resilience in her. “Sometimes I think when the boundaries are so strict and expectations are so high, it can make you feel like you’re not enough, all the time,” Sharon noted. “I know that was really hard for me. I never thought I was pretty, or that special, or smart, or anything. When I got As I needed to get A+.” As noted by Mail on Sunday editor Caroline Graham, the Hollywood megastar’s openness to reveal so much about her past “is all the more extraordinary” in a world where “even minor celebrities curate their images meticulously.”

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