YEAR IN REVIEW 1995 : Following Her Instincts : In ’95 Sharon Stone finally hit the jackpot, with ‘Casino.’ But don’t think she’s ready to cash in her chips just yet.

Two guys in their 50s, possibly academy members from the sound of things, sitting in a tiny bistro in West Hollywood talking about movies. One guy says to the other, “You seen ‘Casino’?”

Guy says, “Yeah. De Niro, whoooh. And Sharon Stone . . . man, best thing she’s ever done.”

And then, as if this were a movie, Sharon Stone walks into the place. She’s wearing leather pants, but it’s possible she is not recognized by the academy members because her hair is up and she’s got on a bland turtleneck sweater under a coat and glasses, no lipstick, and is not really made up on this day to resemble the sleek man hunter of “Basic Instinct” and beyond. She almost looks soft, or as soft as someone can look in leather pants.

She finds her luncheon companion and says, “You see those two guys who look like hit men?” and points to two darker, younger men visible through a window, seated at a table flanking the door. “They’re my bodyguards.” Then, as the bistro’s female owner and maitre d’ leads us back through the kitchen toward a back patio, Stone says, “Just kidding.”

This is the sound of Sharon Stone breaking the ice. And then again, things being somewhat different for her now, maybe she was kidding that she was kidding.

“I was antique shopping in the quasi-antique junk stores on this block and wandered in here,” she says, explaining how she found the restaurant, now a hangout for her. “And she was like [French accent], ‘You know you can sit in the back.’ I thought, ‘Great.’ ”

Life has changed for Sharon Stone, a couple years into her-name-above-the-title, in the way that so many dream it will change when they arrive in Hollywood. In Stone’s case, it took 15 years, the “mean-lean” years she calls them, which ended when screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven handed her an ice pick and asked her to leave her underwear in the dressing room.

“When ‘Basic Instinct’ came out on a Friday, I had one life,” she recalls, “and by Tuesday I had another life.” The other life included, besides getting some better scripts and tables in restaurants, finding alarming numbers of strange men appearing in her yard and even on her roof. She had to move, from a cozy canyon cottage that seated four for dinner to a gated French chateau in Beverly Hills.

“I guess everybody has to deal with this who gets to this position. You know, I’m OK, but the last year and a half, I would say, it’s been out of control trying to keep my life together. I had to hire someone to drive me, so that there’s someone there. So that, when I’m, like, running, with six people running after me. . . .”

Her personal life is not all she might like it to be, which resulted in her not getting quite the house she wanted.

“I tried so hard to find a Spanish house built in the ‘20s,” she says after ordering a plain omelet, salad and coffee. “I had two of them in escrow for the last two years. But I kept getting engaged with people who were, like, they don’t know if they want to sell now and maybe they do and . . . I was, like, I have to move!”

But still, things are good. In the midst of all this change, Stone opened her own production company, made a surprising western with Gene Hackman and got cast by Martin Scorsese as Ginger, the call girl-turned-Las Vegas mom, opposite Robert De Niro in “Casino.” She’s been nominated for a Golden Globe for her scarifying performance, and there is talk of an Oscar nomination.

“Thank God, I mean just finally, wow,” she says about this particular gig and the response to it from critics and others. “I am not getting any younger. It couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

She has completed work on “Last Dance,” a dramatic film for Bruce Beresford about a woman on death row that will open at Cannes in May. Mark Isham has done the score, and “we’re waiting to see if Annie Lennox is going to give us a song,” she says.

This year Stone was invited to Marvin and Barbara Davis’ Christmas party, the one where, as she describes it, “you don’t even imagine that this still exists--this kind of private affair. Like, wow. If they dropped a bomb on that place it would be over in Hollywood.”

A few hours after she finishes her omelet here, she will head over the hill to Burbank and make a surprise appearance on “The Tonight Show”--surprising not Jay Leno but guest Don Rickles, a co-star in “Casino.” In a stunt prearranged with Leno, she will walk out unannounced and plant a vivid red kiss on Rickles’ forehead, then walk off without saying a word and everyone will know it was Sharon Stone.

This is a long way from the days of enduring insults from crass producers and the indignities of “knucklehead B-movies” in which, she remembers, “you had to play every character as a drug addict or alcoholic or there would be no explanation for that behavior and the things you had to say.” And this was not so long ago.

“People have started to call me ‘Miss Stone,’ ” she notes, “instead of just ‘Sharon,’ which I’m sure is a combination of my age and my attitude.”

Her attitude, said to not always be cheery, has no doubt been improved by the afterglow of “Casino.” If she has been known to be imperious she can also be the opposite, and at the moment she seems truly happy with herself while discoursing on the vagaries, opportunities and responsibilities of her new life as one who, at 37, has made it all the way to the top side of the marquee.

Actually, she prefers the classical metaphor of Sisyphus. “I used to think that if I was Sisyphus, I liked pushin’ the rock up the hill, and now I realize that I like sitting on the hill watching the rock roll back down.”

Once, during her hill-climbing period, when things were not going so well, Stone called her then-agent and said, “ ‘I just sometimes don’t know if it’s all worth it and if I should go on.’ And she said, ‘It’s not, it’s not worth it. You shouldn’t go on.’ And I got off the phone and I said, ‘She’s such a baby! I’ll show her.’ I think she thought I was a bimbo probably.”

After she played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s groin-kicking cyberwife in “Total Recall” in 1990, Stone had about enough.

“I went, you know what? That’s it. I’m not gonna work anymore till I get a job I care about. If I have to do theater in my garage and wait tables, that’s it for me.”

She got the part of the sex bomb psycho novelist in “Basic Instinct” after campaigning for it for months.

“I knew when I read ‘Basic Instinct’ that I could play that part. I read it and thought . . . [she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper] . . . ‘Oh, man, somebody’s going to be so good in this.’ Then I went, ‘Wait a second, you’ve got the screenplay, why’d they give it to you?’ I never got why everybody didn’t just die for it, it was such a great part. I guess a lot of people they would have wanted had a lot more to lose than I did.”

Well, the nudity, for one thing.

“I mean, so what?” Stone says, swatting this notion flat. “Although now, I see what incredible greed that it creates. People think that if I’m naked in a movie the movie will make money. I think we’ve all missed the point here. I guess there’ve been like a few movies where other girls have been naked and they’re not making money and those girls have better figures so, like, hello.”

Naked and not, she has worked steadily since “Basic Instinct,” starting with “Sliver,” another Eszterhas script, in which she was the girlfriend of a high-tech voyeur; it did not turn out nearly as well as the first one, suffice it to say.

“I gained 16 pounds and almost snapped, going, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ But I guess the picture, I don’t know, made a fortune.”

She played another femme fatale in “The Specialist” (with His Muscleness, Sylvester Stallone), against type as a super-chilly babe with Richard Gere in “Intersection” and a macho gunslinger opposite Hackman in the semi-satirical spaghetti-like western “The Quick and the Dead,” which she co-produced.

None of these pictures seemed designed as Academy Award material, and some of them (cue the clip of Sly and Sharon in the shower in “The Specialist”) probably made Bob Dole’s smut and violence list. Not that Stone cares about that.

“I think Bob Dole ought to be more concerned about teachers being paid fairly so that our literacy rate will rise,” she barks back. ‘I spoke on C-SPAN. I mean it’s, like, come on, if you don’t want sex and violence in movies, here’s what I say to you: Don’t go.

“It is, however, my feeling that since violent action pictures are the ones making hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps these are the things that people want to see. But I don’t think the escapism of letting out your anger in a movie theater is so wrong. It’s about the way you bring up your children, the way you make the world safe to live in, that tempers how people behave.”

Children? Might there be children in her future?

“I think that part of my life should remain my own,” comes her answer, a little cool. “That’s one thing I really don’t want to talk about, thanks.” Then she adds: “I don’t have children right now and I don’t think I’m going to have any anytime soon. I have to get a date first.”

Stone had to audition for “Casino.” She didn’t want to, and her advisors, in fact, cautioned her to stay away from the part of the two-timing vamp De Niro persuades to be his wife in the kingdom of gambling. This is what someone important said to her: “It’s like this woman is so unsympathetic, she ties her kid to the bed, gets loaded and does coke. . . . Sharon, we don’t think you should go there.”

Who said this, her agent?

“Some people, let’s just say,” she says.

“I didn’t give a good audition either. I’ve always felt that [the late] Jean Rosenthal, who was the real Ginger, helped me get the part. That sounds kind of woo-woo, but we’re in L.A., so what the hell.”

Once she was on the set with Scorsese and De Niro, Stone says, she was--quite the opposite of her tortured character--in the right place at the right time.

“I think for a long time people just did not know what to do with me. I looked like a Barbie doll and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar and then I said these things that were alarming and had ideas that didn’t make sense. And finally I got with Marty and Bob and they were like, ‘Give it all to us, baby, just let her rip; if you’ve got it, we want it, let’s see what you can do.’ ”

While her erstwhile colleagues Verhoeven and Eszterhas were headed toward swamp gas at the controls of that other Vegas tale “Showgirls,” Stone came out the other side of the Marty and Bob “Casino” acting school with a newfound sense of purpose, her ego buffed all the bigger because this time she did have something to lose.

“It’s deeply gratifying in two ways,” she says, wanting to make this clear. “One, because I see the film and I realize . . . [she shifts her voice suddenly into Mock Trembling Emotion] . . . it’s true ! I haven’t been deluding myself all these years. I really can do it. That’s incredibly gratifying. And because I got up to bat with my dream people, the one actor that all my career I dreamed and strived to work with, that was the apex for me . . . and then Marty. . . .

“But I thought, ‘If I get up to bat with them and I just stink, you know, then what? Then what do you tell yourself? Time to move to a new town and get a new job?’ And then to get the pat on your back from your peers is always pretty great. ‘We think you’re good.’ ‘We respect what you did.’ You know, you don’t get a lot of that.”

In her dressing room backstage at “The Tonight Show,” Stone is looking a little vampier. She’s changed into a sparkling thigh-length sleeveless black dress and is seated on the end of a couch right next to a TV monitor rolling the opening credits to the show.

In her hands is a sheet of jokes Leno’s writers have fashioned for her to say when she wanders out during Leno’s interview with Rickles. One of them has her carrying a pair of oversized polka-dotted boxer shorts and telling Rickles, “Don, you left these in my trailer,” which is supposed to play off the fact that ever since “Casino” opened, Rickles has been doing shtick about how much “Sharon Stone wanted me” on the set.

After Rickles’ name flashes on the screen in tonight’s lineup, the words “Meat Loaf” follow. “Meat Loaf!” Stone says quickly, repeating the name of the beefy rock ‘n’ roll belter. “There’s a guy I could date. He’s done some stuff and he’s an actor.” She turns to Kristin Marshall, the woman who is her driver and protector and adds, “Of course, I don’t know if he’s single. That might be a problem.”

At five minutes after 5, there’s a knock on the door, and when Stone opens it, Leno is there and says, “Hi, doll face!” He gives her a hug. Briefly they discuss what’s going to happen with Rickles, and Stone says, ‘I think I’ll just kiss him. I won’t say anything. No boxer short jokes tonight.”

OK, fine, says the host, who heads back to the stage, where the show is about to begin.

After Rickles is introduced, a producer comes to the door to fetch Stone and escort her to the stage. They go down a flight of stairs, through a hallway and then into the backstage darkness of the set where she will wait for the signal that Leno has got Rickles onto the subject of Sharon Stone.

A few minutes pass as Rickles and Leno trade insults, then the magic words are spoken and the actress strides out from the wings with her well-painted lips locking on the target of Rickles’ forehead. A low roar begins in the audience. She swoops down. Pucker and wham, the deed is done. The trash-talking comedian is momentarily at a loss for words, his head smeared with lipstick, the audience clapping approval. Stone waits backstage for the next commercial break then darts off the set and back to her dressing room. In the hall she passes one of Meat Loaf’s young guitarists, who gives her a studly smile, and she gives him a smile back.

“Might want to get the number of that guitar player,” Stone says to no one in particular. “He was cute.”

Meat Loaf himself passes her and says, “Hi, Sharon, have fun,” not realizing she has already been on.

Earlier, when talking about the two sides of fame, Stone was reminded of something Cary Grant once said: “When you become famous, you don’t change, but everyone around you does.” After quoting this, she added the thought “everyone, every day.”

It’s a delicate situation, becoming a star, she says, in the way that it affects one’s interaction with people from movie sets to family gatherings.

“I mean, it can go from ‘I love you, I think you’re great’ to ‘[Expletive] you, you walked by me and didn’t say hello and who the [expletive] do you think you are?’ in like a second. People are really emotionally affected by actors. And it’s a hard line to walk to know how to behave in a way that doesn’t impose or doesn’t withdraw.

“Because everybody wants your attention. They want it so much. Everywhere you go, you know? From your waiter to your busboy to the person at the bank to the salesman in the store. . . . All this is relatively new to me.”

Did she watch any of the Beatles documentary on television recently? She did. And the part where Ringo was talking about how he knew the band was getting big when members of his own family started treating him differently?

“Yeah, I was really identifying with that a lot,” she says. “And John talking about how people weird-out on you.”

Which reminded her of the time she almost met John Lennon.

“I had a momentary interaction with him. Right before he died. I was walking down the street and I walked by him and as I walked by I went to myself, ‘Wow, is that guy really sexy,’ and I got, like, halfway down the block and I thought, ‘Jesus, that’s John Lennon!’ And I turned around and he was standing where he was, looking at me. And we both started laughing. And I walked away, and I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I had a moment of passing with John Lennon.’

“But because of that I understand. People have a moment of passing and they say, ‘I met her and she was really nice’ or ‘I met her and she’s a complete bitch.’ From one moment in passing, there’s an experience of who you are that is real for people.

“But I’m working on it right now because I have found such peace of mind finally as an artist, such a sense of ‘OK, whatever happens from now on in, I touched my dream.’ It’s different now. I’m no longer,” she says, pausing to begin panting as if out of breath, “draggin’ that Buick up the hill.”