Sharon Stone Details 'Brutally Unkind' Treatment During Her Stroke Recovery, Compares Herself to Princess Diana

Sharon Stone successfully bounced back from her 2001 stroke, but it wasn't always easy. The Basic Instinct star opened up to Variety about her tough road to recovery while hosting a Women's Brain Health Initiative even in West Hollywood. She vented about how tough things got when she had to spend seven years learning to write, talk and walk again as she also became embroiled in a custody battle.

"People treated me in a way that was brutally unkind," Stone said. "From other women in my own business to the female judge who handled my custody case, I don't think anyone grasps how dangerous a stroke is for women and what it takes to recover — it took me about seven years."

She added, "[From] trying to keep custody of my son to just functioning — to be able to work at all. I was so grateful to [LVMH head and now the second-richest person in the world] Bernard Arnault, who rescued me by giving me a Dior contract. But I had to remortgage my house. I lost everything I had. I lost my place in the business. I was like the hottest movie star, you know? It was like Miss Princess Diana and I were so famous — and she died and I had a stroke. And we were forgotten."

Her journey was tough, and she now does all she can to tell others the signs of stroke so they can get medical care in time.

"if you have a really bad headache, you need to go to the hospital," she said. "I didn't get to the hospital until day three or four of my stroke. Most people die. I had a 1 percent chance of living by the time I got surgery — and they wouldn't know for a month if I would live."

Stone previously detailed her difficult recovery during an episode of Oprah's Master Class in 2014.

"I thought that I was dying for a long time, even after I came home," she said. "There was a part of me that felt like wow, I lost so much. My career was basically over, my family was over, I got divorced, my child was taken away — a lot of my identity, I thought. I got down, down to it. And when I got down to it, it's like being a phoenix. I was burned to the ground. Because everything I had been before, I thought, 'I'm not any of those things anymore.'"

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