WATERVILLE – With an actress’s dramatic flair, Sharon Stone on Saturday used a Colby College student to drive home the reality of the Iraq war.

Best known for her role in the 1992 movie “Basic Instinct,” Stone asked 17- or 18-year-olds to stand at the Hardy Girls Healthy Women center in Waterville. Allyson Rudolph, a petite and sweet-faced 18-year-old Colby student from St. Charles, Ill., obligingly rose.

The star walked over to Rudolph, put her arm around the young woman and said, “This is what a soldier looks like.”

Stone told the audience of about 50 how she had met a mother whose teenage son had completed his third deployment to Iraq. The mother told the actress she could not understand – “get” – what that really means, and the movie star conceded that it took awhile before it sank in.

“Does she look like she could take it for three rounds?” Stone asked, her arm still around Rudolph, who shook her head. Stone, clad in jeans and a silk blouse, kissed Rudolph on the head and returned to her seat at the front of the room.

In the close 2000 presidential election, 22 million women did not vote, which inspired the “Women on the Move” tour.

Stone is one of several celebrities and elected officials who are traveling to political swing states to rally support among women for presidential candidate John Kerry. Also on the “Women on the Move” tour, which included stops in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Maine, were Alex Kerry, daughter of the Democratic candidate; actress Deirdre Hall of NBC’s “Days of Our Lives”; retired Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy; Rep. Ellen Tauscher of California’s 10th Congressional District; and Maine’s first lady Karen Baldacci.

Baldacci joined the Maine leg of the tour, which included breakfast in Portland, the afternoon event at the Hardy Girls Healthy Women center and a concert in Portland Saturday evening.

Stone described herself as a “kind of bipartisan Democrat” who votes for the best candidate, and “an old hippie” and “a peace person.”

“I’m here more because I’m a mom,” said the 46-year-old actress who has a 4-year-old son. Her eyes welled up when she began talking about the time her son turns 18 and faces possible military service.

Kerry’s pledge to “bring our kids home” resonated with Stone, she said, because he sounded like “He’s trying to be the father of our nation.”

Alex Kerry, 31, confessed to being “an ex-apathetic voter” who, while busy as editor of her college newspaper, missed voting in two elections. But with Bush winning in 2000 by landing 537 more votes than Al Gore in Florida, the importance of voting registered.

Kerry said she tells college students the winning margin “is the size of your dorm.”

After the rally, Kerry challenged the view that her father is indecisive.

“He is an incredibly forceful, strong-willed and incredibly committed decision-maker,” she said in an interview.

Asked why young women should vote for her father, Kerry said he would work for a better economy and health care, which would help women in their first jobs.

Bush, she said, is “weak in all the areas that affect young women.”

Kerry, his daughter noted, plans to offer a deal in which two years of community service can be traded for four years of college tuition. And, she added, parents would be able to deduct up to $4,000 in tuition costs on their income tax.

Kerry bristled at the observation that her father has not connected on a personal level with voters.

“It’s about what he says, and not how he says it,” she said.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher had harsh words for Bush.

“The man is unencumbered by self-doubt,” she said.

Of Kerry, she said, “He actually has nuance in his language and his thinking. He can multitask – he’s like American women.”

In her remarks, Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy said European leaders are afraid of the United States. “They want a return of a righteous and mighty and sane America,” which Kerry would provide, she said.

Kennedy said Bush has been wrong on many key issues, “and what’s worse is he doesn’t know it.” She praised Kerry as a leader who understood “that leadership is about relationships.”