Actress Sharon Stone says one of her most famous roles caused her to lose custody of her son in 2004.

Her famous flash in the 1992 Basic Instinct warped perceptions of her, Stone said on a podcast.

"Do you know your mother makes sex movies?" Stone recalled the judge asking her four-year-old son.

Backlash from the scene, where she briefly exposes herself while crossing her legs, has made her avoid similar roles, she says.

Stone and her then-husband Ron Bronstein adopted their son, Roan, in 2000. But when the couple divorced in 2004, the judge awarded custody to Mr Bronstein.

The loss caused Stone severe heartache, she told host Bruce Bozzi on the Table for Two podcast.

"I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in my upper and lower chamber of my heart," Stone said. "It literally broke my heart."

Considering how much sex and nudity appears on TV today, Stone said, her treatment after the hit movie was brutal.

"You saw maybe like a 16th of a second of possible nudity of me," Stone said. "And I lost custody of my child."

Stone said others in Hollywood judged her for her role in the erotic thriller as Catherine Tramell, a novelist who seduces a police detective, played by Michael Douglas.

"I got nominated for a Golden Globe for that part, and when I went to the Golden Globes and they called my name, a bunch of people in the room laughed," Stone said.

"I was so humiliated," she said. "I was like, does anybody have any idea how hard it was to play that part? How gut-wrenching and frightening"?

Stone said she now avoids roles that cast women in a sexualised light or with dark personalities. But she added that fans should not confuse actors with their characters.

"The guy who played Jeffery Dahmer — no one thinks he's a [person] who eats people," Stone said. "It makes him a very complex person who took an incredibly difficult part."