Brooke Shields made her first appearance in a soap commercial when she was just 11 months old, and her career as a child star took off quickly.

At the age of 11, she played a child prostitute in the 1978 film “Pretty Baby” in which she was filmed naked. Shields’ character is born into a brothel and is auctioned off to the highest bidder in the film.

Teri Shields, her mother, was widely chastised for allowing her daughter to star in the film.

Teri, who also worked as the star’s manager, commissioned photographer Gary Gross to capture nude photos of Shields for the Playboy publication Sugar’n’Spice when she was ten years old. The mother was chastised for allowing her daughter to play such explicit parts, but it wouldn’t be the last.

Brooke and her mother are pictured in 1980
AP

Trending:

• Meghan Markle Steals the Spotlight Again: A Royal Engagement Gone Awry
• “Harry and Meghan’s Tense Moment: A Marriage Under Scrutiny”
• Tension Unveiled: Frances Marquez’s Discontent with Meghan Markle in Colombia
• Elton John’s Scathing Remarks Leave Meghan Markle in Tears at Music Awards
• Meghan Markle’s On-Set Outburst: A Diva in Disguise?

Shields claims she was unaffected by her role as a child prostitute because it isn’t in her ‘nature to be a victim.’

Would Shields, who is now the mother of two girls, let her kids star in a movie like “Pretty Baby”? It depends.

“In 1977, probably,” the actress said in an interview with The Guardian on Monday. “Now, I don’t know if I would. It was a different era.”

Shields stated in a recent interview with The Times Magazine that she feels some post-#MeToo protectiveness has gone too far.

“I think it’s too much,” she said. “You look at movies such as Pretty Baby, you look at Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet or you look at any coming of age movie that Louis Malle did, like Au Revoir les Enfants or Lacombe, Lucien or whatever. There was always a sexual element to them.”

Brooke Shields
Getty Images

The controversial historical drama, which was set in a New Orleans bordello, featured a nude scene in which her character lost her virginity.

The said that she is proud of the picture and that she even prepared a college thesis on director Louis Malle’s work. Shields, like her mother, grew up with a passion for European arthouse cinema.

“I just don’t know if you could make that movie today,” Shields explained. ​”I guess you’d have to have an actress who was older, playing younger. ​I’m not quite sure what the rules are now. ​But I also wasn’t personally scathed by it.”

“Maybe the movies I did wouldn’t be made now because of such censorship, and that’s a tremendous loss. Pretty Baby is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever been in and I will defend it forever.

“I wrote my thesis on it and I’m proud of it.”

In an interview with The Guardian, she was asked if she feels it’s harmful to our culture to sexualize young girls in that way. ‘There’s something incredibly seductive about youth…,’ Brooke explained.

‘I think it just has different forms and it’s how you survive it, and whether you choose to be victimised by it. It’s not in my nature to be a victim.’

Shields also didn’t believe that being exposed to such themes at such an early age was harmful.

“Not when you grow up in New York,” the star clarified. “I mean, it just takes five minutes to see – on the old 42nd Street – what prostitution was. And also I was very sequestered from all of it in my real life. I was a virgin till I was 22, so it was all pretend in my mind. I was an actress. I didn’t suffer privately about it.”

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who rated the picture three out of four stars, described how “Pretty Baby has been attacked in some quarters as child porn. It’s not. It’s an evocation of a time and a place and a sad chapter of Americana.” He also praised Shields’ performance, writing that she “… really creates a character here; her subtlety and depth are astonishing”.

Teri, Brooke’s late mother, has been widely chastised and accused of using Brooke during her early years in show business after pushing her into the spotlight as a baby.

Teri’s ‘iron fist’ attitude to her daughter’s career, as well as her irritation that Brooke wanted to be independent of her, caused the couple to become estranged.

At the age of 11 months, she signed on her daughter, whom she previously described as looking like a “beautiful doll,” to model for an Ivory Soap campaign.

It ushered in a career as a child model, which included advertisements for Breck, Band-Aids, and Colgate.