Film: Fan facts: Sharon Stone, star of `Sphere'

Burger Queen: Before she made her film debut at 22 in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (she played a beautiful woman fleetingly glimpsed from a moving train), Stone had been a successful model in Ford adverts. Her resume also includes a less auspicious stint flipping burgers for McDonald's in the Seventies.

Rocky patch: Stone, who has an IQ of 154 and is a member of Mensa, failed to capitalize on her early success and drifted through the Eighties with parts in big and small screen no-hopers. A hard-nosed performance in the 1989 Arny vehicle Total Recall led to her notorious legs akimbo turn in Basic Instinct (1991), which led to equally steamy real-life bed-hopping antics. Basic Instinct's producer, Bill MacDonald, left his wife, Naomi Baka, to begin a relationship with her, which itself ended quickly. Meanwhile, Naomi was taken in by the film's writer, Joe Eszterhas, and his wife, and before long Eszterhas had divorced her for MacDonald's ex ...

Stony silence: Less a fact, more an unsubstantiated rumour, really - but fun anyway. February's issue of Harper's Bazaar ran a Stone self- interview, in which the star grilled herself for a less-than-enthralled readership. Readers criticised the article as "self-indulgent", with little new about the actress. The postbag was so negative that sources alleged in the New York Post that a fictitious letter in support of her piece was published in order to salvage a little editorial respect.

Mike Higgins