Actress Brooke Shields has lamented she was sexualized as a child star in Hollywood, being at the center of an industry that “is predicated on eating its young.”
Fox News reports the 58-year-old rose to fame at the age of 11 when she played a child prostitute in the controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby. Shields was required to appear in multiple nude scenes.
As a 10-year-old, Shields posed naked for the Playboy publication Sugar’n’Spice.
The Blue Lagoon star reflected on those roles and other requirements Friday as she appeared alongside Meghan Markle and Katie Couric on the SXSW panel, “Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narratives: How Women Lead On and Off the Screen.”
A young model and actress Brooke Shields with her mother and manager Teri Shields. (Photo by Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Christopher Atkins and Brooke Shields on the set of The Blue Lagoon, the 1980 film based on the novel by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, and directed by Randal Kleiser. (Columbia Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
During the panel discussion held to mark International Women’s Day she weighed on the “sexualization” of young women.
“I was at the center of it,” Shields said. “And I was promoting it and I was doing it.” She continued:
And I was lucky because I was surrounded by a very strong mom. I never did move to Hollywood. I always went to regular school.
So I had this sort of community around me that was protecting me, buoying me. And so I did not become the type of statistic that Hollywood created.
Hollywood is predicated on eating its young.
While appearing on the SXSW panel, Shields also opened up about ageism in Hollywood.
“At 58 you’re too old to be the ingénue but not quite the granny yet,” Shields said.
She continued, “I find my reaction is to instead of get angry, find and ferret out the filmmakers who appreciate a woman over 40 and appreciate the life experience, the ‘we’ve raised the children, we’ve had the families, we’ve had businesses, we’ve had professional lives, we’ve left them, we’ve gone back to them.”
This is not the first time Shields has spoken about the perils of Hollywood sexualization, as Breitbart News reported.
In a 2023 documentary, Shields said she was raped by a “major Hollywood player” as a young, rising star.
She declined to name her rapist.