“The entirety of my life, it was, ‘She’s a pretty face,’ over and over and over and over,” Brooke Shields recalls in the opening of the trailer for her upcoming two-part documentary, Pretty Baby. “And that always, just, seared me.”
Throughout her childhood Shields was disturbingly oversexualised by the film industry, and in a post Me Too landscape it’s hard to believe any of her movies were allowed to be made. Having landed her first job at just 11 months old for a soap advert, she posed naked in Playboy aged 10, starred as a child prostitute in controversial movie Pretty Baby aged 11, where she was forced to seductively kiss co-star Keith Carradine, then 27, while a role in teen blockbuster The Blue Lagoon shot her to international stardom aged 15. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote of the film about two shipwrecked teens discovering their sexuality at the time, “All we have to look forward to is: When are these two going to discover fornication?”
