At 59 years old, Brooke Shields is “really tired” of caring what people think.
She’s certainly experienced public scrutiny for long enough – Shields started modelling as a young child, reaching widespread notoriety in the 1978 film Pretty Baby, where she played a girl being raised in a brothel, with nude scenes shot when she was just 11 years old.
“You get really tired after a certain period of time, you’re like: ‘How would I feel, if I just assumed that I was enough?'” Shields now says.
Since her beginnings as a child star, Shields modelled for Calvin Klein and went on to act in various 1980s dramas (such as The Blue Lagoon), and later, sitcoms including Suddenly Susan and Lipstick Jungle – all the while, her personal life and relationships with fellow celebrities (like tennis star Andre Agassi) hitting the headlines.
Over time, she says, she realised that “beating yourself up” has “never really done you any good” and makes you “more angst-ridden”.
“You realise that there’s enough of that coming at you from the world. What if you just go: I like what I’ve done. I like who I am – sure, there have been highs and lows, but isn’t it nice to still want more, to still get excited about things, to still be emotionally available and creatively inspired.
“That is age, that’s experience, that’s having gone through life to the best of my ability, mistakes and all – but I’m proud of it, and being here and going: you’ve done OK.”
Shields jokes that she had a real moment of “I think I did alright for myself” after suffering a seizure triggered by low sodium in 2023. “I literally woke up with a major movie star holding my hand. At one point, I had my husband of 24 years [director Chris Henchy] and this movie star – Bradley Cooper – who is a larger than life guy and we happen to be neighbours [in the hospital room with me]… I joked, ‘I think I did alright for myself. Not bad’.”
This kind of approach feels quintessential Shields: she comes across as an eternal optimist, one who’s keen to find the humour in any situation. While she says she’s always had this approach to life, she suggests it becomes a more comfortable position the older she gets.
“It’s nice not being bound by a biological clock and feeling the pressure – [worrying that] I’m not married, or my eggs are getting old, or I’m not going to be the ingenue.”
Instead of constantly thinking “time’s running out”, she says: “No, time is yours now to do with it what you will.”
That’s not to say Shields doesn’t take things seriously, too – and it seems like she has battle scars from a life lived in the public eye.
“At a very early age, I was made to understand and face that if anyone was going to be at all interested in what my own truth was, it would come from me,” she explains.
“The public, the press, you see at such an early age that no one is really interested in what you think or feel or have to say. It was my experience in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, into the Nineties. I thought – they’re not interested in it, so you better make sure you get ahead of it.”
This could explain why Shields has written multiple autobiographical books, often about major moments in her life – including Down Came The Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression in 2006 and 2014’s There Was A Little Girl: The Real Story Of My Mother And Me. She also starred in 2023 documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, exploring her life and career – particularly looking at how she was sexualised as a child star.
Now, her latest book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, focuses more on what it’s like to be a woman in mid-life. It deals with her personal experiences of menopause, empty nesting, medical issues, setting up her own business and more – with her signature sense of humour, but there are still some shocking stories in there.
She recounts having a cone biopsy in her mid-30s to remove abnormal tissue from her cervix – the procedure was successful, but she writes in the book that no one told her “that such an aggressive biopsy could result in so much scar tissue that it could become difficult to conceive. I didn’t learn that little tidbit until years later.”
While Shields writes that she still would have got the biopsy if she’d been armed with this information, “I would have appreciated having the details so that I could have given informed consent. Had I been aware of the risks, I could have made other choices to support my fertility.”
Thinking back to this incident, Shields reflects: “We’re educated, we have access to ‘the best’ – and I’m not flaunting that, but I’m saying: imagine the woman who doesn’t and has issues, and maybe whose life doesn’t get saved…
“This is happening all over the place, all the time, and most don’t have the luxury of even being able to ask questions.”
After undergoing multiple rounds of IVF, Shields had two children: Rowan, now 21, and Grier, 18. She’s spent a lot of time reflecting on her own life and career, so what advice would she give to her daughters?
“Life lessons do really need to be what they are: life lessons,” she says.
“It’s hard to teach people a life lesson… So I just hope that maybe through seeing how someone they have loved and trusted [has] navigated difficult situations, how there are ways to go through situations like that.
“Hopefully it’s not a bad thing where, ‘Oh, mum wasn’t afraid to be afraid, or to be vulnerable, or look bad or f*** up, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing’.
“Maybe you don’t have to fear failing and making mistakes – nothing should be so tight and precious that you’re suffocating it.”
Ultimately, she hopes her daughters use everything she’s taught them “to give them a bit of a reprieve of judgement on their selves.”
Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old: Thoughts On Ageing As A Woman by Brooke Shields is published by Piatkus, priced £25. Available now.
