“She’s been a huge champion of cinema and giving other actors opportunities,” the actor said of his ‘The Quick and the Dead’ costar

Sharon Stone; Leonardo DiCaprio

Stone previously revealed in her 2021 memoir The Beauty of Living Twice that she vouched for hiring a then-mostly-unknown DiCaprio for a role in the 1995 movie The Quick and the Dead.

Resistant to casting him, “the studio said if I wanted him so much, I could pay him out of my own salary — so I did,” wrote Stone, 65.

DiCaprio, 49, told E! News this week how he thanked the “amazing” Stone for the early-career opportunity.

“I’ve thanked her many times. I don’t know if I sent her an actual, physical thank-you gift, but I cannot thank her enough,” said the Killers of the Flower Moon actor.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Stone, a producer on Quick and the Dead too, also pulled from her salary to get Russell Crowe in the movie, directed by Sam Raimi.

DiCaprio said, “She said, ‘These are the two actors I want to work with.’ It’s incredible. She’s been a huge champion of cinema and giving other actors opportunities, so I’m very thankful.”

In her book, Stone wrote that DiCaprio was the “only one who nailed the audition.” She recalled, “In my opinion: he was the only one who came in and cried, begging his father to love him as he died in the scene.”

Crowe, 59, has also spoken about being grateful for Stone. While on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2020, he said he wouldn’t be the Hollywood star he became if not for Stone giving him that opportunity. He said he’s “got a lot to thank her for.”

Sharon Stone

“I used to say my theory of Los Angeles was you have to be careful because they will nice you to death,” Crowe said. “They will nice you so much that you think everything’s going to go well for you, and then you realize X amount of time later that you got nothing out of all that niceness.”

“It took me probably about 18 months or more and literally hundreds and hundreds of meetings before I actually got an American gig,” he added. “I only got it because Sharon Stone had seen a movie I was in.”

Crowe continued, “She was kind of in a sword fight with the male producers on the film and she just put her foot down and said, ‘I’m going to hire the person I want to hire as the love interest.’ If it wasn’t for her strength of commitment, I don’t know how long it might have been before I got an American movie.”