Words are powerful things. Especially when you make your living based on a perceived image and reputation. 

Actress Sharon Stone attended Cannes Film Festival, said some regretful things about Karma and the Chinese earthquake tragedy, and now is out a lucrative Dior contract.

Reuters is reporting that Dior has dropped ads featuring Sharon Stone from its advertising campaign in China.

The company said Thursday that in the face of the angry Chinese who want a complete retraction, it dropped Sharon Stone from its advertising in China after she suggested last week that the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for Beijing’s treatment of Tibet.

With the Beijing Olympic Games a few months away, the poorly chosen words were Stone's death knell.

Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency, referred to Ms. Stone in an editorial Thursday as “the public enemy of all mankind.”

A spokesman for Dior in Paris, who asked not to be identified because of company policy, said that Dior’s office in Shanghai had issued a statement Thursday in which it announced that it would stop using Ms. Stone in its advertising in China. The statement recognized that the comments had been “hurtful.”

According to the spokesman in Paris, “We also said we shared the pain of the Chinese people and earthquake victims in Sichuan.”

Stone did apologize in a statement released by Dior, in which ” and that she would “wholly devote” herself to helping earthquake victims.

Ms. Stone said last week during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival: “I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

The blow-up also serves as a reminder that companies, having hired celebrities to promote their wares, could end up with little control over their image if the star should stray.

“Celebrities are real people; they have opinions,” said Graham Hales, of the Interbrand consulting firm in London. When Ms. Stone spoke at Cannes, “she was talking as Sharon Stone, not the direct representative of the brand,” he added.

Celebrities are “enormously difficult to manage,” Mr. Hales said, and companies “need to carefully consider whether celebrities really work for their brands.”