Even while walking down the aisle, actress Sharon Stone had known she was making a big mistake. To the world, Sharon and newspaper executive Phil Bronstein enjoyed five years of perfect happiness. According to a report in The Mirror, she expressed how they were mismatched from the start.

"We had this fabulous ceremony: Ray Charles played and it was a great party. But even on the day of the wedding I told him, 'The marriage is for you, the party's for me'", said Stone. Despite being polar opposites, Sharon is not sure where it all went wrong saying: "I took the marriage very seriously and there were many aspects that I found incredibly comforting. Like the fact that I already had a really smart, good-looking date. He always looked good in a tuxedo. He's Phil, he's still the person I call in a crisis. I loved having a marriage, creating a family and having Roan in my life."

Sharon insists the split is amicable and they are sharing custody of Roan. She has left their house in San Francisco and moved back to Los Angeles. Once bitten twice shy it seems, as Sharon refuses to repeat the experience and marry again. Previous marriages to film producer Michael Greenberg and director George Englund also foundered. Accused of trying to get her career back on track by doing a Demi - dating a toyboy, Sharon was linked to 30-year-old Oscar-winning star of "The Pianist", Adrien Brody and Goldie Hawn's 26-year-old son Oliver Hudson. But she brushes this aside as "tabloid gossip" and says too much fuss is made of age.

Sharon's high spirits are a welcome surprise after a tumultuous year, when she nursed Phil through a heart attack, endured her father's battle with cancer and suffered a near-fatal brain tumour herself. "My head blew up," she says of the tumour that nearly killed her. "It was almost as if I had been shot. I had two unbelievably painful shots in the left side of my head that physically knocked me over on to the couch. I called Phil and said, 'I think I've had a stroke.' Yes, I had a white light experience. It was very beautiful and illuminating. It was a profound thing to come back."

She no longer recognises herself as the woman who once boldly proclaimed: "I've got the biggest balls in Hollywood." Now she says: "Without being melodramatic, it's like that was a different Sharon Stone. Now I almost wish I had another name because things are so different for me." Away from the cameras, the spiritual Sharon has been practising the reiki healing technique - with apparently miraculous success.

A man in San Francisco suffering from facial cancer recently proclaimed that she had healed him with her touch. Sharon believes that despite such "unreal" events, her life is now back on an even keel. "I don't know if I have a future," said she, suddenly on a serious note. "We don't know whether we have a future beyond this moment. Is this moment an illusion? Is it a dream? "I have all these philosophical questions now."