Brooke Shields Recounts Fans Trying to 'Cut Off' Pieces of Her Hair Following “Pretty Baby”
Brooke Shields Recounts Fans Trying to 'Cut Off' Pieces of Her Hair Following “Pretty Baby”
Virginia ChamleeMon, June 1, 2026 at 8:30 PM UTC
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Brooke Shields in May 2026; and in 1978's 'Pretty Baby'
Credit: Dominik Bindl/Getty; Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock
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Brooke Shields is opening up about the attention she got from fans following the release of Pretty Baby
Shields was 11 years old when she played a child prostitute in the 1987 film
The attention became so intense that she "refused to to do anything for years," she said in a new interview
Brooke Shields is opening up about the response she got from fans following Pretty Baby, her 1978 movie in which she played a child prostitute when she was 11 years old.
Speaking on the Monday, June 1 episode of The Bosstickspodcast, Shields, 61, noted that the film was her "first big movie."
"And it was such a difficult shoot to do because we were in New Orleans for almost five months and it was just a period movie, and the hours were really long and it was during summer," Shields recounted. "So I only worked the three months and then I had to work, like, on weekends so I didn't miss school."
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Brooke Shields in 'Pretty Baby'
Credit: Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock
But once the film shot her to superstardom, Shields noted the attention became intense.
"And then we went to the Cannes Film Festival with the film. And there was such a frenzy about me and it was crowds of people and them trying to cut off my hair and it was insane," Shields recalled, adding that they "wanted a piece" of her.
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"It was ridiculous," she added. "And my mom and I were like, 'Nope, never again. No more movies for us. Go back to modeling.' "
Shields added that the film was "controversial" but that her mother, Teri, who died in 2012 and managed her daughter's career until she reached her 20s, didn't think it would be controversial at first.
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"It was a French director's first American film," she said. "And so we were so proud cause my mom always just, like, took me to Fellini movies and took me to to all these art films. We'd see Disney cartoons and stuff too, but she was taking me to these real art house movies from the the time I was a little girl. And so I had this appreciation of cinema and then was so happy to be a part of a film that was really cinematic and then it just, like, wrecked our whole life our lives and we just refused to to do anything for years."
Shields would go on to star in 1980's The Blue Lagoon before briefly leaving Hollywood to focus on her education, graduating from Princeton University in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature. She has since returned to the screen, starring in a variety of movies, from Running Wild to The Midnight Meat Train, and TV shows, including Suddenly Susan, Lipstick Jungle and Acorn TV's You're Killing Me.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
