Brooke Shields Had to 'Fight for Normalcy' as a Child Star, Empathizes with Wanting to 'Punch a Paparazzi'

Brooke Shields says the revelation in the ’50s made her think about her career — and think about what it might have been like if her mother hadn’t been a manager.

IN Brooke Shields must not ageThe 59-year-old actress writes that she was told in the early 50s that Hollywood agent Sam Cohn, who represented Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Cher and Sigourney Weaver, wanted to take her on as a client when he was young.

“It’s the first time I’ve heard anything about it!” Shields writes. “My God, I struggled, if I had signed with him then, it would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of my acting career.”

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Teri Shields and Brooke Shields in 1981.

Roxanne Lowit/WWD/Penske Media via Getty

As it was, Shields’ mother, Teri, who died in 2012, managed her daughter’s career well into her 20s. Shields rose to fame in the late ’70s, starring in provocative films such as 1978’s Beautiful baby when she was only 12 years old and in the 1980s Blue lagoon when she was 15 years old.

“Hearing all these years later that I lost that opportunity, I thought, What good is that to me now?’ “ Shields writes. “I think about what my career would have been like if I had known, or had the guts to demand, a professional agent. Maybe I wouldn’t have become someone who was made into a doll or who had branded hair dryers (I still have hundreds of them in my garage). Maybe I wouldn’t have had to go to Japan to do a commercial for Nescafé in the mid-1990s to keep our brownstone.”

During the appearance at 2023 The Drew Barrymore ShowShields discussed her complicated relationship with her mom.

“That’s all I knew, you know what I mean?” Shields told Barrymore. “But we have things. It’s like, I made a movie and we got a car. All I knew was, keep your mother alive, keep dancing and get things.”

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Cover of ‘Brooke Shields Ain’t Allowed to Grow Old’.

Flatiron Books/Amazon

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Elsewhere in his new memoir, Shields looks back at the footage in his 2023 documentary. Beautiful baby: Brooke Shields how her mother taught her to swim as a child.

“My mom is sitting by the pool giving me feedback,” she writes of the video. “You see me jump out of the water and swim to it, and the first words out of my mouth are ‘What am I doing wrong?’ He instructs me to ‘think, not down, and think all the way to the other end of the pool’ and gestures with his hands from the comfort of his sun lounger.”

Shields writes that it wasn’t until she rewatched the documentary that she realized her mother actually couldn’t swim. “She was never coached, but I watched her train like she was Katie Ledecky,” she writes. “That was our relationship in a nutshell. To me, she was the arbiter of all things Brookie.”

Shields admits she wishes she had “more of a past. More of a rebellious streak” in her younger years. But she also sympathizes with stars who have walked a similar path to hers.

“The truth is, I absolutely understand the urge to shave your head, smash your car window with an umbrella, and say f— you to all that craziness,” she writes. “Hitting the paparazzi. The stalking is constant from the moment you leave the house, and it can really mess a person up… I had to fight for normality… My attitude has always been, I won’t let them win.”

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Source: HIS Education