Brooke Shields Could Have Turned Into Another Child Star Gone Bad, But She Turned Out OK In Spite of Odds, Which Were Stacked Against Her

Back in April/May 2024, Brooke Shields was featured on the cover of AARP magazine. 

I recall growing up and my parents used to comment that they felt Brooke Shields' mother was essentially pimping her daughter out by having her star in sexualized movie roles, most notably when she starred in the movie "Pretty Baby" in which she was raised in a brothel as a child prostitute, but beyond that, in her early roles as a child star, she was frequently naked on camera. That would be the first of a number of starring roles and risqué magazine covers were far more mature than she was as a child star which her mother arranged on her behalf. That's the short version of the story, but the truth was that Shields has made no secret of the fact that she had a "very complicated" relationship with her mother.

The April/May 2024 AARP magazine cover wasn't even the former child model-turned-actress' first cover for the senior magazine, although it was followed by an announcement that she had just been elected as the next president of the Actors' Equity Association, the labor union representing stage actors and stage managers. Back in 2015, she also appeared on the cover of AARP magazine because she had just turned age 50 at the time, and AARP always tries to make aging seem normal (which it is, except in the entertainment industry which is notoriously ageist, especially for women). But in recent years, some comparably-aged actresses in particular (notably Justine Bateman and Jodi Foster) are among a growing roster of female Hollywood stars who have publicly stated that they have no intention to get plastic surgery as some of their older peers did, and hopefully that trend will continue. 

Brooke Shields' Ivory Snow ad

But Brooke Shields is kind of having another moment in public these days. She appeared on the cover of AARP magazine in April/May 2024 (her second cover since appearing in 2015 when she turned age 50) and in 2023, she had a successful autobiographical two-part series which aired on Hulu, and later on ABC, and this year, she also co-starred in a small part for the recently-released original Netflix movie "Mother of the Bride".

Brooke Shields' 2023 original two-part documentary which aired on Hulu (and later on ABC) entitled "Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields" which essentially borrowed the title from the 1978 movie named "Pretty Baby" which she starred in as an 11 year-old in which she portrayed a 12-year-old girl being raised as a prostitute in a brothel in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans, by her prostitute mother. "Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields" was a very telling documentary from Shields from her own perspective. At the time of the 1978 movie with the same title, it was just a film role, but critics felt the story was a little too close to reality since Shields was, in the view of some, being pimped-out by her mother as a child model and occasional actress. 

Her daughters Rowan and Grier told People in an interview that they really did not like the 1978 film "Pretty Baby". For example, daughter Grier, now age 18, said "I don't like this movie. I've seen enough of it on TikTok. I would prefer not to watch my mom being sold, as an 11-year-old prostitute. I'd rather watch the funny and happy ones." She added about her mother playing a prostitute with an older man "That’s weird. She had to kiss someone [over] twice her age." 

Sister Rowan, now age 21, argued her mother's "stage kiss does not count as a real kiss." Rowan went on to share that she's not "purposefully avoiding" watching her mom's movies. "It's more like it never really crossed my mind to say, 'Movie night, let's watch 'Pretty Baby.' She added that "I loved 'Mother of the Bride' and 'Castle for Christmas'." 

Brooke Shields was first put in the spotlight at the age of 11 months in an advertisement for Procter & Gamble's Ivory soap, and later became famous as a 15 year-old teen model in ads for a then-new designer named Calvin Klein which was considered, at the time, scandalous with a tagline asserting "Nothing gets between me and my Calvins" (see some coverage of that at https://www.vogue.com/article/behind-the-moment-brooke-shields?utm_source=VOGUE_REG_GATE for more). 

Many of her early TV commercials were considered sexually suggestive with a minor, so much that the Calvin Klein commercial was banned by ABC and CBS, but Calvin Klein (who had changed his name from Ralph Lifschitz) saw the negative publicity raise his company's public image and the clothing even more than the commercials did by themselves, so he was fine with it. Meanwhile, Shields' mother also pushed her daughter to star in such big-screen movies as "Pretty Baby", "The Blue Lagoon", and "Endless Love" and most of the early films featured on-camera sexual acts and nudity for the young model/actress. 

None of her early movies were really award-worthy, but at least a few were commercially successful thanks, in part, to the scandal. Shields and her mother had learned to leverage scandal successfully.

Sheilds' Cavin Klein jeans ad

While Brooke Shields never earned critical accolades for her acting ability (she was OK, but no critic ever said she was Oscar-worthy), her stage mother was actively commercializing and selling her young daughter. Shields, while attractive, also wasn't (in real-life) a young sexpot as the roles she was playing on-screen seemed to suggest that she was. For her, it was nothing more than a job which paid handsomely. 

While many children raised in such an environment have spiraled out-of-control at a young age, becoming troubled former child actors/actresses and descending into drug and/or alcohol abuse (think of tragedies like actress Dana Plato as one example) or entering quasi religious cults (such as Kirk Cameron who now masquerades homophobia which was taught to him by Evangelical Christian ministers, only he believes falsehoods taught to him by preachers) which he says was the reason he avoided fairly common child-star fate, except he was a high-school actor not a child. Today, few in Hollywood seem willing to hire an adult Kirk Cameron, making him unlike peers of the same era, such as Jason Bateman or Leonardo DiCaprio who have managed to avoid child-star tragedy through hard-work without succumbing to religious cults. I think more impressively, Brooke Shields managed to avoid a very similar child-star fate which has destroyed countless other child-stars who were unprepared to handle being discarded like yesterday's trash after their time in the spotlight ended.

In fact, to her credit, Brooke Shields was able to successfully leverage her celebrity status by attending Princeton University from 1984 to 1987 (she majored in Romance language and literature, with a focus on French literature) and she even managed to graduate with honors. Some peers including Jodi Foster (Foster attended Yale between 1980 and 1984) did the same. Yes, their celebrity-status enabled them to attend well-connected, respected private schools, but they were hardly academic prodigies. There is little doubt she successfully leveraged her celebrity status to gain entry into an elite, Ivy-League university, but we know that plenty of others with far less intelligence have used legacy admissions to do the exact same thing. And importantly, Shields has successfully leveraged a key advantage of attending such a university: by networking with others to continue her stardom on her own terms. 

There is no doubt that upon adulthood, Brooke Shields had an overbearing, controlling stage mother. But when her mother Teri died in 2012, in an interview with The Sunday Times (see https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brooke-shields-i-posed-naked-at-ten-now-im-telling-my-story-cqwd0wmkt for the interview), after making the 2023 Hulu documentary "Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields", she also revealed: "That made me look at what kind of person I am and to give myself a little credit," she said. "I had to contend with so much at such an early age, and there was resilience, but also I put on blinders as a defense mechanism. But now I can look at that little girl and think, 'She did it, she pulled through.'" However, she also admitted that her relationship with her mother "was complicated". And, she did not go unscathed, for example, her first, failed marriage to Swiss tennis star Andre Agassi ended in divorce just two years after the couple was married.

After graduating from Princeton (with the market for Romance language and literature majors being what it is), Shields eventually returned to her career roots (not in modeling, but acting), starring in a television sitcom "Suddenly Susan" from 1996 to 2000 which was reasonably successful. The show ran for four seasons, respectable enough for a TV sitcom at the time. She has acted occasionally and played occasional guest starring roles, such as in the Chuck Lorre sitcom "Two and a Half Men". This year, she even celebrated her 23rd wedding anniversary with Chris Henchy. The couple has two daughters Rowan, 21, and Grier, 18 and the couple is poised to soon become empty nesters over the next five years or so.

The fact that Brooke Shields has managed to successfully age and raise a family speaks more about her as a person and the fact that her mother (in spite of her critics) speaks a lot about her personal character and her upbringing. Brooke Shields has critics, but almost no one can deny that she has managed to make the best of what life dealt her and that she avoided a similar fate of other child stars who were acting when she did as a child.