In her new, two-part documentary, “Pretty Baby”, Brooke Shields dives into her career and its consequences.
“I didn’t understand how you could arbitrarily call a certain face the face of a decade. I mean, does God come down and say, ‘This is the face’? I couldn’t get my mind around it, because you don’t do anything to look a certain way. You’re born looking a certain way, and then that becomes your currency in the world’s eyes.”
In the documentary, which is told in her own words, and in conversation with her two teenage daughters, Rowan and Grier, 19 and 16-years-old, respectively.
She dives into her treatment by the acting industry, which she entered when she was only 11 months old. During her breakout performance in Pretty Baby, the 11-year-old Shields was made to kiss her co-star, the then 29-year-old Keith Carradine, she remembers a comment from Carradine which guided her through the experience:
“Keith said to me, ‘You know, this doesn’t count as a first kiss.’ That was, in hindsight, such a generous, beautiful, gracious thing, to try to protect a child—there was nothing lascivious about it. And I will always be thankful for that.”
This week, a grown Brooke Shields went to Turks and Caicos with her daughter, Grier. She discusses in the documentary that she can’t imagine what happened to her would happen to her daughter in the current era, and reflected on the difficulty of explaining that gulf to her “woke” daughters.
They’re so woke! It was interesting to see them say what they felt about [her role in 1978’s Pretty Baby]. Their big issue was that I was my age. I was proud of them for being able to talk about all of it. I don’t know. You can’t really say, “Oh, it was just a different era.” It was a different era.
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/brooke-shields-never-knew-normal
