Sharon Stone has opened up about what it was like losing custody of her oldest son Roan
The interpreter has recalled that a judge questioned her role as a mother after participating in the film with Michael Douglas.
Although Basic Instinct was one of the most memorable roles in Sharon Stone’s career and made her a sex symbol, it also took an unexpected toll on her personal life. No doubt the actress did not imagine that starring with Michael Douglas in this script with a high erotic charge was going to cost her what she most wanted in life: the custody of her eldest son Roan. So recalled the 64-year-old performer during an episode of the Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi podcast (on iHeartMedia and Air Mail), where she talked about the toll the film, which she shot in 1992, ultimately took on her. “I lost custody of my son,” he recounted.
“When the judge asked my son (he was eight at the time), ‘Do you know your mother makes adult movies?’ It’s kind of an abuse of the system, that it was valued what kind of mother she was for having made that movie” she said, assuring that in today’s television there is much more content of this type now. The actress, who has two other adopted sons, Quinn, 16, and Laird, 17, claims that losing Roan (now 22) then broke her heart, literally. “I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with tachycardias.”
This isn’t the first time Stone has spoken about the effects the title had on everyone involved. “Director Paul Verhoeven ended up in the hospital and kept getting nosebleeds. There was a lot of pressure on set,” he told The New Yorker a few months ago. “Now it’s more commonplace, but back then what we were doing was new. It was a big studio production and there were a lot of things that, at the time, broke the rules” she said. The tape made her a sex symbol and one of the most sought-after stars in the industry. Recalled Sharon on the aforementioned podcast that when she first went to the Oscars, just as the title had just come out, she didn’t have the money to buy a good dress. “Everyone was wearing 35,000 to 45,000 euro dresses and I bought a polyester Betsey Johnson one because it was the best I could afford.” A few years later, in 1996, things changed so much that at the same gala she picked up her statuette for best actress for Casino.
The custody battle for Roan, a child she adopted in 2000 with her husband Phil Bronstein, began at the end of 2007. The former couple, who divorced in 2004, shared custody of the child, who was 8 years old at the time, so he spent time with each of them. However, he went to school in San Francisco, where his father lived. Sharon decided to ask for a modification of the terms of the agreement, since she wanted the child to spend more time in Los Angeles with her and the other two children she adopted alone, Laird and Quinn. The ruling, however, was not favorable to the actress.
She has gone through some very hard times in recent years. In August 2021, after losing her grandmother and godmother during the pandemic, she reported the death of her nephew River, only eleven months old, from multi-organ failure. Shortly afterwards his mother, Dorothy, suffered a stroke, but fortunately managed to pull through. The bad news continued in the fall of 2022, when Sharon was diagnosed with a tumor that needed to be removed. A month ago she announced the death of her brother, Patrick Joseph Stone, at the age of 57 from a heart attack.