The 17th Zurich Film Festival honoured actress Sharon Stone with its most prestigious accolade for her career on Saturday evening. The American actress accepted the award at Corso 1 and was moved to tears. She described the lifetime achievement award as the greatest honour of her career. The ZFF then screened the movie classic CASINO, for which the iconic actress received an Oscar Nomination.
The Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) presented Sharon Stone with the Golden Icon Award for her career on Saturday Evening. In honour of the American acting icon, the ZFF also screened Martin Scorsese’s Mafia drama CASINO, for which the versatile character actress was Oscar nominated in 1996.
Stone was very touched. In her acceptance speech, she spoke of how her job had taught her to love people. “We don’t have to like each other,” she said, “but we have to love each other.” This is a lesson she has internalised off screen as well, she said. “It’s a lesson that has taken me to my humanitarian work. It’s a lesson that has taken me to war zones. It’s taken me to hospitals, hospices and orphanages. To places that were overcrowded, places where people were starving, where people were devastated.” Stone called for people to love one another. That’s what her audience taught her: “Thank you to cinema. Thank you to you here in Zurich. Because you don’t know me, but you have decided to love me.”
The Golden Icon Award for her life’s work, Sharon Stone concluded as she was moved to tears, was an honour that meant more to her than “any other award, at any time, anywhere in my entire life”. Lastly, she once more expressed her gratitude to the audience: “If this is my lifetime achievement, I owe it to you.”
Sharon Stone accepted the Golden Icon Award from the hands of Christian Jungen. The ZFF’s Artistic Director praised Stone in his laudation as “a true icon of the seventh art, a woman Hitchcock would have loved: Mysterious, sometimes dangerous, and smarter than any man. An actress who still embodies the glamour of classic Hollywood.” Jungen also referred to the fact that Stone was one of the first female superstars in an era dominated by male stars and “stood up against sexism long before MeToo”, thus becoming a role model for many young actresses. He went on to mention her recently published memoir ”The Beauty of Living Twice”, in which the star of TOTAL RECALL (1990) and BASIC INSTINCT (1992) gets even with a Hollywood of the time, and emphasised the innovative nature of the versatile character actress: “She has an IQ of 154, which means only one thing: she is highly gifted. She has also exercised her brainpower in the producer’s chair, producing Sam Raimi’s THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, a feminist western now some 25 years old, but truly way ahead of its time.”
During “A Conversation With… Sharon Stone”, which takes place on Sunday, September 26 (Arena 4, 15:00) as part of the ZFF Masters strand, the Golden Icon Award recipient offers insights into her career and tells of her commitment to equal rights for women in Hollywood.
This is the fifth time in a row that the Golden Icon Award has gone to a woman. Previous winners were Juliette Binoche, Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench and Glenn Close, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas, Richard Gere and Sean Penn.
Credit Suisse is Partner of the Golden Icon Award.