It's funny what a brush with mortality can do to your average celebrity. (Her two other adoptive children, both boys, came after her divorce from Bronstein.) Then, in October 2001, came a moment of personal trauma: she woke up with a throbbing headache that turned out to be bleeding on the brain, and was lucky to be discharged from hospital, in apparently perfect health, just eight days later. Shortly afterwards, Stone became a mother, adopting a son, Roan, in 2000. But things really got interesting following her marriage to the San Francisco-based journalist Phil Bronstein in 1998, when she was introduced to Buddhism, allegedly by Richard Gere. It started, true to celebrity cliché, with the Church of Scientology, which she subscribed to for a few years during the mid-1990s.
