Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby will be released on Hulu on April 3rd. The 57-year-old actress gave interviews in advance. In them, she commented on the biopic revealing for the first time that she was raped in “her twenties.”
After Shields had roles in the films “Pretty Baby” and “The Blue Lagoon” when he was 12 and 14, the order situation subsequently fell; Child stars have it harder in Hollywood. After completing her studies in the 80s, she then met with an unnamed Hollywood producer in the hope that he could get her career going again. After they had dinner together, he took her to his hotel room under false pretenses and abused her there. She has remained silent for years, sharing the incident only with her confidant and national security adviser, Gavin de Becker.
Shields later blamed himself. “I kept telling myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Why did I go up with him? I shouldn’t have drunk anything while eating'”. She also remained silent because she assumed that nobody would believe her. “I thought I’d never be able to work again after that.”
However, her biopic Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby does not focus on the incident. Shields himself sees the film, which premiered at the Sundance Festival on January 20, as a part of the debate.
“It’s a larger discourse about the sexualization of young women. I have found myself at the center of this situation for many decades. I was part of that discourse – maybe even part of its focus – and it has changed over time, depending on outside influences. Now that I’m a mother of two young women, the conversation about sexuality is very different now than it used to be. For me personally, that conversation didn’t exist when I was a kid.”
The documentary traces every step of Shields’ early history, from taking Garry Gross nudes when she was ten, to her cast as an underage prostitute in Pretty Baby, to the Blue Lagoon producers’ prompting that the 14th -year-old and then 18-year-old Christopher Atkins should also get closer off the set: “You see everything in the documentary – and it’s a miracle that I survived that.”
She discussed her experiences filming the 1980 romance on her podcast last year. In 2021, Shields starred in the Netflix production A Castle for Christmas. In the same year, she launched the community and wellness platform Beginng Is Now, which aims to connect women over 40 and encourage them to share their successes.