“It was the best creative project I’ve ever been associated with, the best group of people I’ve ever been blessed enough to work with,” she tells Vanity Fair.
Louis Malle’s film, released 40 years ago this week, made an indelible impression on its pre-teen star, just as she made an indelible impression on the world in her first starring role. If Shields hinted that she had heard negative comments about herself or the film, her mother responded, “Are you proud of what you did? Well, then fuck ‘em.” Today, she remains resolutely proud of the movie. Teri Shields, her mother and manager, saved every article and review written about her daughter, like the People magazine cover that proclaimed, “Brooke Shields, 12, stirs furor over child porn in films”-but protectively never shared them with her daughter. But she was insulated from the controversy ignited by her nude scenes in the film.
There was no hiding Brooke Shields from the frenzy surrounding the 1978 film Pretty Baby, in which she starred as 12-year-old Violet, who lived with her prostitute mother in a Storyville brothel in 1917 New Orleans.
