The protagonist of 'The Blue Lagoon', married and mother of two daughters, tells in her documentary 'Pretty Baby' what her difficult beginnings as an actress were like.
She made her debut at less than a year old in a commercial, at eleven years old she played the role of a pr---itute in the movie Pretty Baby and at 14 years old she starred in some erotic scenes in the movie The Blue Lagoon. With these roles under her belt and only 15 years old, no one was surprised that Brooke Shields was considered a child prodigy in Hollywood and that many directors were already thinking of her for great teenage roles, without thinking about the consequences that a career could have. so meteoric at such a young age.
Now 56 years old and with more than 80 films and television series behind her, the actress wanted to capture all her experiences in the documentary Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby in which she recounts how she had to face her own child exploitation due to the great her mother's obsession with making her a star from her early years of life.
She came from an aristocratic family by birth, she was a descendant of the first settlers of Virginia in the 16th century. Her father, Francis Alexander Shields, was a senior executive at Revlon, son of the popular tennis player Francis Xavier Shields and Italian princess Donna Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi, whose great-uncle was Prince Alessandro Torlonia, husband of Infanta Beatriz. of Bourbon. Her mother, Theresia Anna Schmonn, an actress, model and film producer, wanted to capitalize on the beauty of her daughter, thus leading her to live some of the most bitter and unhappy chapters of her life.
Shields recounts in the documentary that it was difficult for her to understand how her mother did not intervene when, at just 11 years old, she was forced to seductively kiss Keith Carradine, then 27, in the 1978 film Pretty Baby and like her own daughters, Rowan , 19, and Grier, 16, refuse to watch that tape “It's child pornography, Mom!” the girls say about her. “Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?” they add. Brooke flatly answers them “No” although she admits that it was very difficult for her not to try to justify her mother. “I don't know why she thought everything was fine,” says the veteran actress.
Addicted to alcohol for much of her life, Brooke's mother, who died in 2012, made her daughter's adolescence very complicated although Shields has admitted that she cannot be angry with her because her mother was very insecure and despite continuing to defend the indefensible, there are things that the actress will never understand, such as the fact that he allowed her to pose N- for a Playboy publication at the age of 10.
The interpreter, who throughout the documentary breaks down on numerous occasions, has admitted that even in the books published about her life she was not telling the whole truth about her mother. "It was too much for me to deal with, really," Ella Shields says. “Writing about it just broke me in two. She was the one I was protecting,” she admits.
Brooke, who has also confessed that she suffered a rape in 1987 by a man in the film industry whose identity she did not want to reveal, confesses in the documentary that she is "surprised" to "have survived all that" being so young and so vulnerable. "I started to trust myself and thought, 'I can have my own opinion,'" and after many years of insecurities, Brooke managed to find herself and move forward.
Currently, Brooke Shields is enjoying a very calm and stable stage in her life. She has been married for 22 years to the screenwriter and television producer Chris Henchy, father of her two daughters, whom she married just one year after separating from the tennis player André Agassi, with whom she was only two. years married.
