he “face of a decade” is sitting
opposite me with two large, black,
comma-like stickers planted
beneath her eyes. It is testament
both to the professionalism of the
owner of said face and the depth
to which we are engaged in our
conversation that neither of us
has mentioned it as, casually and
wordlessly, she has removed her
spectacles, torn open a sachet, teased out the
sticky commas – cosmetic miracles that
magically de-puff the under-eye area – and
attached them firmly to her face. There they
will remain, taking up prime Hollywood real
estate, for the next hour or so.
Following her controversial rise to fame at
12 years old, when she played a child prostitute
in the film Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields and
her face defined the Eighties and became a
byword for its provocative popular culture.
She starred in two notorious coming of age/
end of innocence films, The Blue Lagoon and
Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love, at the age of
15 and 16 respectively, and shocked middle
America and its denim-buying masses with
her 1980 Calvin Klein advert in which she
proclaimed, “You want to know what comes
between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
(Simpler times.) It’s difficult to overstate just
how ridiculously, globally famous the teenage
Brooke Shields was.
And now, aged 56 and in the sixth decade
of a career that has waxed and waned – in the
early Nineties she was reduced to endorsing
cauliflower for the Foxy vegetable company- she’s still very much here, all cheekbones
and eyebrows. “I just keep moving” she says
with a shrug. “Reinvention has always been
my path to longevity. I didn’t want to go away.
I’m a Gemini. I’m stubborn and I don’t like
losing. I didn’t want to be told I couldn’t do
things, and I was told no all the time.
“I’m ambitious. Even more so now. And
I want more now. There’s more value in me
and it hasn’t been cultivated yet.”
There is, she says, “this perception that if
you’re famous or recognisable, that you’re
‘box office’, then that’s enough. But it’s not.”
When she appeared on Broadway in 1994,
playing Rizzo in Grease, it was, she says, “stunt
casting”. “I was a novelty on Broadway, but I
studied every day and I was good. Then it was,
‘Oh, there’s this television show [she played
the lead in the sitcom Suddenly Susan in the
late Nineties, which led to more comedic
roles] – who knew she could be funny?’ ”
Similarly, you might well land upon
her latest film, the Netflix festive offering
A Castle for Christmas, drawn to its cosily
nostalgic leads – Shields opposite The Princess
Bride actor Cary Elwes as a grumpy aristo in
overalls – but then find it perfect post-roast/
holiday hangover viewing.
Shields’s character, Sophie Brown, is a
prolific chick-lit author, recently divorced, with
a college-age daughter. “She’s an empty-nester
with a successful career,” says Shields. “And
she’s my age.” It’s new, she thinks, to find a
rom-com focused on a middle-aged couple
and to see a female character in her mid-fifties
being celebrated for being sexy. “I think it’s a
different type of prime.” And Shields relates to
it closely. “Some parts of my body I wish were
as high as they were in my twenties,” shequips. “But I don’t covet being that age again.”
Despite (or perhaps because of) modelling
swimwear from the age of 15, Shields has
spent a lifetime battling with her body image.
“I was always called the ‘athletic’ one, which
is a euphemism for ‘not skinny’. ‘She’s the
athletic type. She’s a handsome woman. She’s
a workhorse, a mule,’ ” she says, rolling her
eyes at the list of backhanded descriptors. “My
mum wasn’t skinny. My dad was 6ft 7in and a
big guy. We’re a big family. But I never fit into
any catwalk clothes and then you are just the
Vogue model from the neck up, comparing
yourself with every skinny actress and model.”
Such critical messaging was compounded
at home. “My mother [a highly volatile
alcoholic to whom Shields was devoted until
her death in 2012] would get drunk and say,
‘Why don’t you move your fat ass?’ So I’ve
always believed I had a fat ass.”
Until a few years ago she wouldn’t wear a
bikini. “My kids [her daughters with husband,
Chris Henchy, a comedy writer, are 18 and 15]
were the ones who said, ‘Mum, you can’t wear
that muumuu. You have to show your body.’
Body image has changed. These kids celebrate
their shape.”
One daughter, she says, is curvy. “She got
that from me and I don’t want her to hate it- or hate me. So I can’t denigrate my own
body and cover it up, because what message
am I then giving her?” Last year, aged 55, she
posted bikini shots of herself. “Elasticity is a
problem,” she laughs. “I think I should have
walked around on my hands for a decade.”
A couple of hours later, however, as she
cavorts around our suite in the Four Seasons
Downtown in New York wearing, variously,
a red bra top and leggings, a sheer lace dress
and a leopard-print body and fishnets, all taut,
toned flesh and not a muumuu in sight, I am
most definitely with her daughters on this one.
Although Shields insists that she herself
did “have a childhood”, it was not one that
many would recognise as such. Her father,
Frank Shields, was the preppy, privileged
businessman son of Italian aristocrats on his
mother’s side and tennis players, actors and
bankers on his father’s. Her mother, Teri
Schmon, was pure blue-collar New Jersey and
worked in a brewery and at a garment factory.
When Teri announced she was pregnant after
a brief fling, Frank’s family paid her to have
an abortion. She took the money and spent it
on a coffee table. They married but divorced
when Shields was five months old and while
Teri never remarried, her ex-husband went
on to wed a socialite and have three more
daughters, with whom Shields grew up,
shuttling between two worlds: her father’s
Long Island luxury and the Upper East Side
apartment where she lived with her mother.
T
Her mother was viewed
as a narcissist and
alcoholic. ‘She was hated,
for sure, but not by me’
At a fashion show in New York, aged 12, in 1978With Michael Jackson in 1984, aged 1932 The Times MagazineAARON RICHTER, RON GALELLA/GETTY IMAGES, GETTY IMAGES Continues on page 45