“I talk about it a lot in therapy, but I think because I was so …” She pauses. “I don’t know why I didn’t,” she says when I ask why she never hurtled down that path. Hollywood is littered with the broken careers, and lives, of child stars. Then Shields escaped it all and took up a place at Princeton University, which she says now perhaps wasn’t the best timing in terms of her career, but probably saved her sanity. There were the blatant cash-generators – there was a Brooke Shields doll and she put her name to a range of hairdryers – and also highly sexualised adverts for Calvin Klein, and the film Blue Lagoon, in which, not yet 16, she spent most of the time naked. As a teenager in the 80s, she was everywhere.
She appeared in a soap advert when she was 11 months old, and famously as a prostituted child in the film Pretty Baby at age 11. Shields has been famous almost all her life. And all of a sudden, I was like: ‘Why am I not represented?’ Why am I told: ‘You’re over because you’re not in your 20s’? I’m 56 and I feel more empowered now than I ever did.” I still care about people, but I don’t put myself in this position to feel ‘less than’.
“I feel stronger, I feel sexier, I feel less burdened by: ‘Oh, what do they think of me?’ I’m not encumbered in the same way that I spent a great deal of my youth in. Shields recently launched her own company, Beginning Is Now, an online platform for women, which came out of this newfound confidence. With Cary Elwes in A Castle for Christmas. We’re not defined by this, this or this – and that includes motherhood. And I’m capable of it, and I’m independent.’ We love the men in our lives, but we’re not reliant on them. My friends are moms who are starting new careers, who are empty nesters, and who are saying: ‘I’m this age but there’s so much more for me to do. “There’s a level of confidence, a level of ‘I don’t give a shit’. Shields has seen it in her friends, and in herself. They’ve raised kids, they’re moving on to this next phase and there’s a lot of power that comes with that.” There are lots of women in their 50s like Sophie, she says, “who are taking their life in their own hands. And, despite the film’s many conventions, a middle-aged romcom still feels quite radical. Shields is great as bestselling American author Sophie Brown, who, suffering with writer’s block, escapes to Scotland to trace her roots and ends up acquiring a stately home. The plot of A Castle for Christmas may be as predictable as gift-wrapped socks, but sometimes you just need preposterous cosy escapism. “There’s dogs, castles, knitters, pubs!” she says, laughing. Shields is in a Christmas romcom, for Netflix, which is the gift you didn’t know you wanted. She has, she says with a smile, when I point out how together she seems, “been going to therapy for 35 years”. And here she is, radiant through my laptop screen, in her beautiful New York townhouse kitchen, with a dog at her feet, husband milling about in the background, one teenage daughter upstairs, another successfully packed off to college, and her sense of humour very much intact. She even came through the 90s’ overplucked-eyebrow trend unharmed. H ow, I wonder, is Brooke Shields so sorted? She has survived a childhood with an alcoholic mother, some disturbing early films, a nation’s creepy obsession with her, a divorce and severe postnatal depression.
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