Sharon Stone did everything in her power to ensure that her late mother, Dorothy, would die peacefully.
“In the night that she was dying, she did not want to die and she was really fighting it,” Stone, 68, recalled on the Thursday, June 25, episode of “All There Is Live with Anderson Cooper” podcast, recalling Dorothy’s death last year. “It was down to those moments where they titrate the morphine that we had in home medical staff.”
According to Stone, her mom had been “holding on and holding on” for hours.
“I finally realized, ‘I have to let go. I need to release my mother. I need to stop walking in the room. I need to go upstairs and ignore my mother so she will die,’” Stone said on Thursday’s episode. “[I thought], ‘I need to detach and release, and she’s only going to die if I let go.’”
Stone acknowledged that it was “hard” to let go and watch Dorothy die because she wanted more moments with her mom.
“I wanted her to say, ‘I’m proud of you. I love you. I’m sorry. You’re important to me.’ I wasn’t going to get them,” the actress stated. “I had to make peace with the fact that my mom was not going to do that. … I had to go upstairs and close the door, and I did it.”
After Stone left the room, an orderly eventually told her to come downstairs because Dorothy was dying.
“I said, ‘No, nope.’ … I had to hold so she could die,” she said. “And then [the medical team] came up and said, ‘She died, we’re going to take her out. Do you want to come down?’ I had to hold because I had to allow her [to have] her release.”
Amanda Edwards/Getty Images Sharon Stone is reflecting on her 2001 stroke and the aftermath that came with it. The Basic Instinct actress, 66, opened up about the near-death experience in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Tuesday, July 9, telling the outlet that the people around her “took advantage” of her during her […]
Stone continued, “It was so hard because I wanted her to die in peace, and in order for her to die in peace, I had to release her. Sometimes that’s what you have to do.”
Dorothy, who died in July 2025 four years after suffering an acute stroke, had been living with her daughter while on hospice.
“When my mom died, she was at my house and I was taking care of her, but she didn’t want it to be acknowledged between us that it was me,” Stone said. “I had to pretend that I was staff. I’d come in with a towel over my arm and say, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Stone.’ I would take care of her [as] if anyone else was there, but when we were alone, she unloaded all the trauma of her childhood that she hadn’t been able to say.”
