Sharon Stone is on the cover of the June MORE magazine and in the interview the actress, 52, talks about her dating life and the plastic surgery disaster that happened six years ago after her divorce from newspaper editor Phil Bronstein.

On why she got lip injections:
“Nobody loved me. I’m 103. My life would be better if I had better lips.”

On her reaction to the procedure, which made her swear off plastic surgery:
“What the hell?” and “(I looked) like a trout.”

On her divorce:
“It takes a long, long time to come to the point where you can actually say that you got married because you were in love with the person. And it makes me cry… To admit your own lovingness was, for me, a harder step. Not to be embarrassed or ashamed that I could love somebody who didn’t love me. And that can be OK.”

On her current dry spell:
“Life and love is like the ocean. Sometimes the tide is in and sometimes the tide is out, and sometimes it’s like the frigging Mojave. Fortunately, I like the desert. I’m a desert flower.”

On dating younger men:
“I really get pursued by men in their twenties, like, a lot,” she says. “They probably know there’s food in the fridge and that somebody’s there to talk to them and ask themhow their day was.”

Then there’s this, from the NY Daily News:

Originally appeared in April 2010 More

By Amy Wallace

Photographs spill out of big manila envelopes, making a mess of Dana Delany’s coffee table. There’s one of Dana at about age five, chubby and jubilant, a Mexican hat on her head and dish of M&M’s in her hand. There’s the actress at 16, with frosted hair, and another snap taken a few years later, after she opted for a perm. She grimaces, but fondly, as she appraises them: the head shots (doe-eyed ingenue, strong-jawed heroine, and one that she calls her Shannen Doherty look); the captured moments from her film, theater and TV work; the Polaroids from countless photo shoots and a pile of candids with her family and friends.

As she shows me a group portrait of her father, uncle and paternal grandfather (“I identify with all of them. We’re all Irishmen”), I start to divine a pattern, which continues to emerge as she offers up shots from her fiftieth birthday party four years ago, which was hosted by her best friend, who happens to be male. “I was his best man at his wedding,” she says, and I’m tempted to comment, but Delany beats me to it.

“The thing I notice is I’m hanging with the boys,” she says, fanning the photos in front of her. Only later will I realize she is leading up to the most surprising moment of our interview.

No conversation with Delany is dull, and during my time in her high-ceilinged modern house in West Los Angeles she will sound off about sex after 50, menopause and swimming with dolphins. She will discuss her ongoing spiritual search and talk about remaining unmarried while truly liking men. Still, I’m caught off guard when Delany reveals that in her dreams, she imagines being a man. And not just any man, but—wait for it—George Clooney.

“It might sound funny, but I wouldn’t mind being the female version of him,” she says, explaining that she doesn’t know Clooney, really, unless you count the time 23 years ago when he was on The Facts of Life and Delany was doing a sitcom called Sweet Surrender and they shared a makeup room. “I wish we shared a dressing room!” she jokes. “I can’t honestly say I know him, but I’ve watched him from afar, and I really admire what he does.”

It is clear, as she ticks off Clooney’s charitable works, his savvy acting choices, his reputation for being a great, loyal friend and, yes, the fact that “he honestly says, ‘I’m not getting married. It doesn’t interest me,’ ” that this perpetually single, politically active Emmy-winning actress has thought through the Delany/Clooney comparison. She has also thought about how it will sound.

“I know—people are going to say, ‘Oh, she wants to be a playgirl,’ ” she says. “But that’s not what I mean. I like him because he’s a responsible human being who loves his life. Who is totally true to himself.”

You don’t have to spend much time with people who know and love Delany to understand how precisely her description of Clooney also describes her. Delany is warm, open and supremely comfy in her own skin, her friends and colleagues say, and that gives her easy access to a generosity that can be uncommon in Hollywood.

“She’s just a doll,” says Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, who considers Delany one of his five leading ladies despite the fact that she didn’t join the show until its fourth season. (Delany was his first choice for the role of Bree; she turned it down, three times. Now she plays Katherine Mayfair, a divorcée who this season was accidentally shot and spent time in a mental hospital.)

“Dana knows she’s talented, and that gives her an inner peace that a lot of people in this town don’t have,” Cherry continues. “She doesn’t take herself so seriously, and she’s genuinely interested in people’s lives. A lot of actresses can be narcissistic. Not so with our Dana.”

Peggy Sirota took it.

I wrote the accompanying story. It’s in the April issue…

Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California is a suite of rooms modestly tucked into a colorless cookie-cutter office park—all sprayed stucco walls and fluorescent lights. I’m ushered into a conference room so unadorned there is not even a campaign poster on the walls. Whitman sits at the head of a white meeting table, and as I sit down beside her, two handlers pull up chairs as well. The space offers no clues to Whitman’s personality, and she doesn’t reveal much herself. In her black suit and black-and-white sweater, the former CEO of eBay, now 53, is still the picture of a put-together corporate titan. And her approach is all business. Seeming energized by an earlier discussion of the state budget with her campaign staff, she tosses numbers around with confidence. When I ask where she’ll find the votes to win the race (the primary is in June, the general in November), she breaks down the research in a tone so self-assured that I can almost see a thought bubble forming over her head: Statistics may scare some women, but not me.

Over the months that I reported this article, I often heard the candidate and her staff say that they want people to know “the real Meg Whitman.” Jillian Manus, the chair of Whitman’s women’s coalition (dubbed MEGaWomen), told me, “Everyone knows what she’s done. I want to let people know who she is. To feel her, get her, touch her.” But Whitman is hard to know, much less touch. She’s quiet, understated and more wonky than ebullient after a career spent largely in Silicon Valley tech circles—in all, not the type that seems born to storm the political stage. Unlike Sarah Palin, Whitman doesn’t wink or quip or let go with unscripted rants; unlike George Bush, she doesn’t give people funny nicknames; and unlike Bill Clinton, when she tries to show she feels your pain, she sounds a bit wooden. Forget your pain; she seems at times not even to feel her own.

But with her high-level Republican connections (she counts Mitt Romney and John McCain as friends) and her jaw-dropping personal fortune ($1.2 billion, by a 2009 Los Angeles Times estimate), Whitman is a candidate no one can ignore. Having left her job at eBay in 2008, she is now pursuing politics as a second act and at this moment is in mid-leap—committed to her new calling but, with no experience running for elected office, uncertain of her odds. Her political future boils down to this: Will she persuade voters—especially women—that the talents she parlayed into a billion bucks can guide California through the recession’s perfect storm?

If only every voter Whitman is courting could meet her mother. While the candidate seems all discipline and reserve, Margaret Whitman, 89, does not, and the stories she tells about the young Meg hint at what lies beneath the candidate’s cool. “When she was little, she was extremely determined. Whatever she decided to do, she was going to do,” says Margaret, recalling that swim meets in particular brought out the competitor in her younger daughter. “Meg was a pretty good swimmer. But at meets, I had to be there, because if she wasn’t at least first or second, she’d be screaming with rage. There was no second best for her. She has always loved to win.”

During the summers, while Whitman’s father stayed behind at his financial services job on Long Island, her mother took the three kids—Whitman and her older sister and brother—on cross-continental adventures. They traversed the western U.S. one year and Alaska the next; on that trip, they drove the desolate, partially unpaved Alcan Highway. Whitman was only six, but the image of her mother lashing four spare tires to the roof of the family camper, just in case, stays with her. Whitman recounts how in the 1940s, before having kids, her mom volunteered to be a war mechanic in New Guinea. “She’d never looked under the hood of a car or fixed anything with a wrench,” Whitman says. “But she knew that’s where the critical need was and where she could make the biggest contribution. The learning curve didn’t stall her. In fact, it fueled her.” To Meg Whitman, the parallel is clear: “I am my mother’s daughter.”

Originally appeared in More Magazine December/January 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Standing behind her in the supermarket line, I could see the girl was pretty. Slightly built, her dark hair cut in a bob, she evoked an Asian Audrey Hepburn. Then I saw the scar. Perfectly straight, it bisected her upper arm about six inches below the shoulder of her sleeveless blouse. More than anything else, it was the color that hit me: Against her suntanned skin, the gash was bright purple.

Tough break, I thought, as the cashier scanned her saltines, her soy milk and her fifth of Jack Daniel’s. (I live in Hollywood; this is what passes for groceries among wannabe actresses.)

Maybe it was the tabloids staring vacantly from the rack, but my mind jumped to the cause of the girl’s wound—a late-night car crash, perhaps, or a sledding accident involving a barbed wire fence. In my head, I saw the girl in the ER, bravely biting her lip as a handsome surgeon mended her bicep. I imagined the argument she’d had with herself: Dare I, or dare I not, go sleeveless ever again? I admired her for answering yes, purple scar be damned.

Then she turned to swipe her debit card. This is the moment in the daydream where you hear the screech of a phonograph needle yanked across vinyl or the screen goes black. Because suddenly I saw that the thick purple line wasn’t a scar at all. It was a tattoo—a tattoo of a little bald-headed boy in footie pajamas drawing a fat, straight line with a huge purple crayon. It was a tattoo of a boy I recognized, a boy whose name I had known almost all my life. Harold.

In that moment, I thought: Maybe there is a God.

There is a photograph of me, age two and a half, lying on my stomach on a quilted pink bedspread. I am wearing a white nightgown and resting on my elbows, a book propped open in front of me. I have raised my head to look at the photographer, and although I am not smiling, I am very happy. I know this for two reasons. One, I’m kicking my feet in the air. Two, judging by the picture of a hot-air balloon clearly visible on the page I’m reading, I’m two thirds of the way through my first favorite book: Harold and the Purple Crayon, written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson.

Originally published in 1955, seven years before my birth, the book contains just 64 pages, many of them with only a few words. But the story’s impact on me—on how I see the world—could not be bigger.

I was raised not to believe in God. I’ve never turned to any religious text for solace, for guidance, or to make sense of my life. But at the age of 47, I still seek out Harold.

He’s easy to find. Open the book, and he’s on every page. Plunked down in an all-white landscape with only his wits and his crayon, he is nothing if not resourceful. “There wasn’t any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight,” the book says. So he draws a crescent in the sky. When he needs direction, he lays out a purple path so he won’t get lost. By his own hand, Harold always saves himself.

For me, Harold’s story has been a parable about making your own way in the world. Harold’s teachings are simple. His hand is steady. You could call him my guru. But that’s not quite right.

I guess you could say I worship in the church of the purple crayon.

“And he set off on his walk, taking his big purple crayon with him.”

When I was four years old, my mother put me in a borrowed yellow Karmann Ghia with a man I’d never met and pointed the car west.

We had been living in New Jersey for only a few weeks when my mom decided on this course of action. She believed my father, a young philosophy professor who was just starting at Princeton, had cheated on her. But that wasn’t all. At the local supermarket, she saw other faculty wives trudging from aisle to aisle, screaming children in tow. Suddenly, she knew she didn’t want to be one of them. How much her moment of clarity had to do with the fact that she’d met someone else—a graduate student back in California—I guess I’ll never know.

Originally appeared in More Magazine, July/August 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

As the toughest, lustiest cop on TV, Holly Hunter loves to explode expectations—about women, morality, aging and the need to always be in control.

Holly Hunter is talking about sex, and who wouldn’t want to listen? During her nearly three-decade career, after all, the Academy Award–winning actress has often plumbed the murky depths of the erotic. In 1987, playing the neurotic and conflicted producer in Broadcast News, Hunter moaned, “I am beginning to repel people I’m trying to seduce!” Six years later, as The Piano’s mute and unhappy bride, she made a tiny hole in her dirty black stocking more alluring than any Victoria’s Secret teddy—and won an Oscar for her work. In 2003, playing an emotionally insecure mom in the coming-of-age film Thirteen, Hunter emerged from a shower completely nude. (To do otherwise, she says, would have been to break a cardinal rule: Never step out of character while the cameras are rolling.) 

But as Hunter’s TNT series Saving Grace begins its third season on June 16, the 51-year-old star isn’t just naked (a lot). Her character, Oklahoma City major crimes detective Grace Hanadarko, is lusty. Hungry. Foulmouthed. “Feral,” as Hunter puts it. Oh, and she’s got a guardian angel—the kind who sometimes flashes big white wings and has a direct line to God. Grace is complicated, to say the least. Which is why playing her demands a lot more from Hunter than merely stripping off her clothes.

“There was an episode last season where I was tied up for the entire first act,” Hunter says, laughing as she describes the scene: Grace, buck naked and handcuffed, facedown, to her fourposter by a frisky one-night stand, gets stranded for hours after her new lover flees the house. The situation was at once steamy and hilarious.

“It was just such a gas,” she says, recalling how—before his abrupt exit—her paramour signs his name on her butt with red lipstick. Usually on TV, she adds, such a story line would resolve with a tasteful fade-out, if it got filmed at all. On Saving Grace, however, the camera lingered. And Hunter couldn’t have been happier.

“That’s something that I love—the iconic female in the act of surrender,” she says, sipping a cup of tea in a corner booth at Art’s, an old-school San Fernando Valley deli favored by Hollywood’s creative set. As she sees it, surrender is part of sex “for any female, unless you are a dominatrix. What’s interesting is to see someone go, god, I want to go off the cliff. Grace says yes to situations that are not about being a control freak. It’s the primitive versus the civilized. The raw versus the polished.”

As Hunter talks, her slim shoulders get narrower, making her seem even tinier than her five feet two inches. But the way her brown eyes flash gives her a forcefulness that transcends size. “Grace loves dealing with chaos,” she continues. “She thrives on it. There’s an enjoyment of walking into the center of maelstroms.”

As for Hunter . . . “How do I feel about chaos?” she says, her mouth going a little crooked as she repeats my question. “Well, you know, I’ve got plenty.” Her famous Georgia twang gets almost growly, and when she laughs, it’s a low, mischievous chuckle. “I’m at home in it. I could weep with how at home I am in it.”

She declines to get more specific, but some of the tumult may arise from relocating the family—her partner, actor Gordon MacDonald (The Thin Red Line, The Brave One), and their three-year-old twins—from New York to Los Angeles for six months of the year while she works onSaving Grace. Add to that a rigorous production schedule, made all the more so by Hunter’s unflagging devotion to all aspects of the show, from casting to wardrobe to sitting in the editing room. During the months of filming, Hunter—who is an executive producer of Saving Graceas well as its star—typically works 16-hour days, as many as six days a week.

“She really is doing a huge job,” says Laura San Giacomo, who plays Rhetta, the OCPD criminalist and Grace’s best friend. “She’s like Atlas with the world on her shoulders—but dressed really cool.”