Missed opportunities and lost roles might be ubiquitous in the film industry, but it’s not nearly as facile as it seems, handling the sting of rejection, especially when it comes to a coveted part like that of the leading woman in the Lana Turner biopic that Sharon Stone had her eyes set on.
Sharon Stone Was Vetted to Play Lana Turner
With a career spanning almost five decades and a highly publicized (oftentimes scandalous) life, Lana Turner was no short of a spectacle in Hollywood. While the late ’30s witnessed her ascent to fame, the ’40s and ’50s saw the late actress lose herself completely in a whirlwind romance with a Los Angeles gangster, Johnny Stompanato, who had used the alias of John Steele to win her over. The course of their relationship was a tempest of controversies, manipulation, and violence.
Stompanato would later go on to die at the hands of Turner’s then 14-year-old daughter after he’d threatened to kill three generations of women in Turner’s family, including the late icon.
While the Imitation of Life star died in ’95, there had been talks in the 2000s about creating a film exploring her tumultuous life. In light of the same, Sharon Stone had reportedly been chosen to portray Turner and Antonio Banderas was being considered as her dangerous lover with the pioneer of Asian-American cinema, Wayne Wang set to shepherd the biopic.
But alas, things didn’t quite pan out the way Stone would’ve wanted, with Adrian Lyne taking over the director’s chair and wanting Wednesday‘s Catherine Zeta-Jones to depict the leading lady opposite John Wick‘s Keanu Reeves for Stompanato’s part. And though the project has, to this very day, never fully materialized, Stone felt the sting of rejection just as deeply.
Shots Fired at Catherine Zeta-Jones
The Total Recall star, who had had the pleasure of meeting Turner in her final years, had been “handpicked” by the Hollywood icon herself to portray her in a biopic should one ever see the light of day. So, when Zeta-Jones, 53, got the potential part instead, Stone, 65, was displeased, to say the least. So much so that she reportedly took a dig at the former after being replaced –
“You can know your job, but it seems you have to be flavor-of-the-week.”
Zeta-Jones is the wife of Michael Douglas, the actor Stone worked with, in 1992’s Basic Instinct, which was responsible for her breakthrough in the industry. So, when the Oscar-winning actress chanced upon Stone’s alleged remark about the casting news during an IGN interview, she didn’t hesitate to give a piece of her mind either –
“Supposedly, Sharon wanted to play Lana Turner. And I know Sharon really well. And I dunno. But guess what? I wanted to be in Basic Instinct 2.”
But at the end of the day, it looks like neither of the two got the much-desired opportunity of playing Turner because the biopic never came into existence either way.
Source: Female First
