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Brooke Shields opens up about her childhood in ‘Pretty Baby’
The actress opens up about her childhood experiences in her new documentary.
It’s no secret that Brooke Shields had a difficult childhood as a result of her mother putting her in movie roles that revolved around sex and other topics inappropriate for a child.
Now the actress has finally opened up about the effect her earliest roles have had on her in her new Hulu documentary ‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’, named after her 1978 movie ‘Pretty Baby’ where she played a child prostitute.
The role her mother played in her early career
On the ‘Pretty Baby’ role, Shields said that at the time, she had seen the movie as an “artistic venture”, and recalls seeing European art films with her mother, Teri Shields, including the 1962 French movie ‘Jules and Jim’.
“I was in an industry that shoots you to fame and gives you money and exposure, and you hear stories of so many young people who fall prey to addiction and lose their way,” she said.
“It was miraculous to me that I didn’t fall into those traps. But it was because I was caring for an alcoholic, and I saw what I did not want to become.”
Shields’ mother passed away more than 10 years ago in October 2012 as a result of complications from dementia.
‘Pretty Baby’, released in 1978 when Shields was 12 years old, was controversial when it was released, with Shields’ mother defending the choice to allow her child to be in the movie.
In an archived interview shown in the documentary, Teri says: “I always knew she was beautiful. The moment I brought her home from the hospital I just knew she’d be a star. A star.”
On the other hand, in a recent interview with The New Yorker, Shields explains how she parented her mother as she worked on movies.
“When you grow up in an alcoholic household, you learn to navigate it at a very young age, and I was an only child. I just wanted to keep her safe.”
She added, “The irony is that film sets were such a place of safety for me because I was always accounted for.”
Shields sees the over-sexualization of girls in today’s world
In the documentary, Shields speaks about what she feels is the over-sexualization of girls nowadays, which she says is worse than what she experienced as a child actress.
“While we may have made progress as a culture in the sense that the messaging from girls today is ‘I’m deciding what I put out there’ in those videos, there is frankly a whole other level of sexualization that to me looks scarier than what I felt when I was a child,” Shields said, referring to social media posting in today’s age.
“I was so naive about my sexuality. But I do feel these young, young girls are overly sexualizing themselves.”
She refused to allow her youngest daughter, Grier to pursue modeling, for fear that she would experience the same situations she did.
“But I realized she was passionate, and if I’m the mother I’m professing to be, someone who listens, I had to start saying, ‘OK what can I do to help her?’ And I could help with connections to people I trusted.”
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is now available to stream exclusively on Hulu.