1966–1977: Modeling and career beginnings Shields began her career as a model when she was 11 months old in 1966. Her first job was for
Ivory Soap, when she was photographed by
Francesco Scavullo. After appearing in the
1974 TV adaptation of
Arthur Miller's play
After the Fall, Shields made her feature film debut in the
New Jersey-shot horror film
Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), portraying a young girl who is murdered during her first communion. The film was later re-released in 1981, capitalizing on Shields's rising fame at the time. Next, Shields worked with director
Woody Allen in his 1977 film
Annie Hall, but her role was cut out of the final edit of the film. Shields and her mother Teri appeared on the cover of the September 26, 1977 issue of
New York Magazine, in a cover story about her modeling career. The main headline on the cover read, "Meet Teri and Brooke Shields" while the subtitle read, "Brooke is twelve. She poses nude. Teri is her mother. She thinks it's swell". Although the September 26, 1977 issue was listed in a 2008 collection of classic covers on the
New York Magazine website for its 40th anniversary, unlike the other listed issues, there is no link to the cover story about Shields' career as a nude model.
1978–1979: Breakthrough film work The 11-year-old Shields was cast as the lead in French director
Louis Malle's
Pretty Baby (1978), in which she played a child named Violet who lived in a brothel, the daughter of a prostitute played by
Susan Sarandon. There were numerous nude scenes in the film, including those in which Shields appeared naked. Gossip columnist
Rona Barrett called the film "
child pornography", and director Malle was described as a "combination of
Humbert Humbert and
Roman Polanski".
South Africa, and the Canadian provinces of
Ontario She or her body double also appeared in a dorsal nude scene in the 1979 release
Just You and Me, Kid, which co-starred
George Burns. In the movie, Shields also appeared in a scene where she apparently is naked, covered only by a deflated car tire inner tube while lying in the trunk of Burns' vintage automobile. Shields also was portrayed as nude in a third scene where she was being held hostage. For her work in the movie, she was paid a fee of $250,000 (equivalent to $ in dollars), plus six percent of the profits.
Just You and Me, Kid received poor reviews. Critic
Roger Ebert, in his
Chicago Sun-Times newspaper review, gave the film two out of four stars, calling the film "a charming disappointment." Siskel's newspaper review further stated that her part in the film had "no substance, and she is incapable of appearing fresh. It's a stilted, nervous performance from a teen-ager who has not had a single acting lesson and could use a dozen." Despite the controversy, the campaign was hugely successful. She next appeared as a lead in
The Blue Lagoon (1980), which included nude scenes between teenage lovers stranded on a tropical island (Shields later testified before a U.S. Congressional inquiry that older
body doubles were used in some of them). The same year, she was the youngest guest star to ever appear on
The Muppet Show, in which she and the Muppets put on their own version of ''
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''. She was also the youngest person to host
ABC's
Fridays, a
Saturday Night Live-like sketch comedy show, in 1981. Her next major film role was in
Franco Zeffirelli's drama
Endless Love (1981). The
MPAA initially rated
Endless Love with an
X rating. The film was re-edited to earn an
R rating. For her performance in the film, she received her first
Razzie Award nomination for worst actress. She won the
People's Choice Award in the category of Favorite Young Performer in four consecutive years from 1981 to 1984. During this same period, she starred in the
USPHS PSA sponsored by the
American Lung Association as an initiative that
VIPs should become examples and advocates of non-smoking. By the age of 16, Shields had become one of the most recognizable faces in the United States, because of her dual career as a provocative fashion model and child actress. During that period Shields became a regular at New York City's nightclub
Studio 54. In the mid-1980s, Shields began her support of the
USO by touring with
Bob Hope.
1981–1983: Legal battle over nude photos From 1981 to 1983, Shields, her mother, photographer
Garry Gross, and
Playboy Press were involved in litigation in the
New York City Courts over the rights to photographs her mother had signed away to Gross (when dealing with models who are minors, a parent or legal guardian must sign such a release form while other agreements are subject to negotiation). Gross was the photographer of a controversial set of nude images taken in 1975 of a then ten-year-old Brooke Shields with the consent of her mother, Teri Shields, for the Playboy Press publication ''Sugar 'n' Spice''. The images portray Shields nude, standing and sitting in a bathtub, wearing makeup and covered in oil. The courts ruled in favor of the photographer due to wordings in New York law. The ruling would have been decided otherwise if Shields had been considered a child "performer" rather than a model.
Richard Prince "Spiritual America" In 1983, in the wake of the legal battle over ownership of the photos, artist
Richard Prince photographed one of Gross' photos of the 10-year-old Shields standing naked in a bathtub. He developed it, put it in a
gilding frame and, displayed it without labelling or explanation, in a shopfront in a then rundown street in Lower East Side of Manhattan. In 2005, Prince released a work titled
Spiritual America IV. It was photographed in collaboration with Shields when she was 40 years old. It depicts the actor in a near-identical pose as the original
Spiritual America, but wearing jewellery and a bronze bikini, while leaning against a Vengeance chopper motorbike.
1983: Sahara and Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor Shields played a romantic lead in
Sahara (1983) for a fee variously reported as $1 million or $1.5 million. Her mother,
Teri Shields, was executive producer of the picture, with a fee of $25,000. The movie was a critical and financial failure, released only in the Western United States after poor previews and grossing $1.2 million against a budget of $15 million (equivalent to $ and $, respectively, in ). For
Sahara, Shields earned the distinction of being the only actress ever to win the
Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor. At the
1984 Razzies, she was nominated for both the
Worst Actress Award and Worst Supporting Actor, as "Brooke Shields (with a moustache)".
1983–1987: Hiatus and academic studies After making a minor appearance in
The Muppets Take Manhattan, Shields took a career hiatus to focus on her academic studies. She enrolled at
Princeton University in the fall of 1983 and graduated with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in
French literature in 1987. She was a member of the
Princeton Triangle Club and the
Cap and Gown Club. Her autobiography,
On Your Own, was published in 1985. Her 1987 senior thesis was titled "The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of
Louis Malle,
Pretty Baby and
Lacombe Lucien."
1988–1999: Film, stage, and television roles tour on January 1, 1991 Shields played the eponymous lead in the 1989 movie
Brenda Starr, which had been shot in 1986 for an intended 1987 release but was held up for years over legal problems due to the rights to the comic strip and demands from Shields' mother that she receive top-billing in the picture, which co-starred
Timothy Dalton. When the film was finally released in 1993, it was roasted by critics and bombed at the box office. Kevin Thomas in the
Los Angeles Times wrote, "
Brenda Starr (citywide) arrives after some five years of legal disputes over distribution rights. It would have been an act of kindness for all concerned, including the paying customer, to have left it on the shelf where it belongs."
Peter Travers, writing for
Rolling Stone, gave the film a negative review, writing, "There's been so much negative insider buzz about Brooke's 'Brenda' that you might be harboring a hope that the damned thing turned out all right. Get over it.
Brenda Starr is not as bad as the also-rans that Hollywood traditionally dumps on us before Labor Day... it's a heap worse."
Entertainment Weekly would later place the film on its list of "21 Worst Comic-Book Movies Ever". In 1993, Shields made a guest appearance in a fourth-season episode of
The Simpsons, called "
The Front". The following year, she starred as Rizzo in the 1994
Broadway revival of
Grease. In a 1996 episode of the popular comedy sitcom
Friends, Shields played
Joey Tribbiani's stalker. This role led directly to her being cast in the title role of the
NBC sitcom
Suddenly Susan, in which she starred from 1996 until 2000, and which earned a
People's Choice Award in the category of Favorite Female Performer in a New Television Series for her, in 1997, and two
Golden Globe nominations.
2000–2010: Further television and film work In 2001, Lifetime aired the film
What Makes a Family, starring Shields and
Cherry Jones in a true story of a lesbian couple who fought the adoption laws of
Florida. For four months, beginning July 2001, Shields portrayed
Sally Bowles in the long-running Broadway revival of
Cabaret. In 2004, Shields made several recurring guest appearances on ''
That '70s Show'' playing Pam Burkhart,
Jackie's (
Mila Kunis) mother, who later was briefly involved with
Donna's (
Laura Prepon) father (
Don Stark). Shields left ''That '70s Show'' when her character was written out. In September 2004, she replaced
Donna Murphy in the role of Ruth Sherwood in the 2003 revival of
Wonderful Town until the show closed four months later.
Ben Brantley of
The New York Times praised the "goofy sweetness" she brought to her interpretation of the role, but wrote that she fell short of Donna Murphy's "perfection." In April 2005, Shields played
Roxie Hart in a long-running production of
Chicago at the
Adelphi Theatre in London's West End. This made her the first performer to have starred in
Chicago,
Cabaret, and
Grease on Broadway, three long-running revivals noted for "
stunt casting" of celebrities not known for musical theatre. Shields recorded the narration for the Sony/BMG recording of
The Runaway Bunny, a concerto for violin, orchestra, and reader, by
Glen Roven. It was performed by the
Royal Philharmonic and
Ittai Shapira. In the late 2000s, Shields guest-starred on shows like
FX's
Nip/Tuck and
CBS's
Two and a Half Men. In 2005, Shields appeared in a second-season episode of
HBO's
Entourage, entitled "Blue Balls Lagoon". In 2007, she made a guest appearance on
Disney's
Hannah Montana, playing Susan Stewart, protagonist
Miley Stewart's (
Miley Cyrus) mother, who died in 2004. In 2008, she returned in the prime time drama
Lipstick Jungle. The series ended a year later. She also appeared as a featured celebrity in
NBC's genealogy documentary reality series,
Who Do You Think You Are?, where it was revealed that, through her father's ancestry, she is the distant cousin (many generations removed) of King
Louis XIV of France, and thus a descendant of both
Saint Louis and
Henry IV of France.
2011–present: Television hosting; documentary Shields took over the role of
Morticia Addams in the Broadway musical
The Addams Family beginning on June 28, 2011. Starting in 2013, Shields has been an occasional guest co-host in the 9:00 hour of
Today on NBC. She also recurred during
season 19 of
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Sheila Porter, the maternal grandmother of
Olivia Benson's (
Mariska Hargitay) adopted son, Noah Porter. Shields is the subject of the 2023 documentary,
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, directed by
Lana Wilson, who also directed the
Taylor Swift documentary,
Miss Americana. The two-part series, which aired on
Hulu on 3 April 2023, is "A look at actor, model and icon Brooke Shields as she transforms from a sexualized young girl to a woman discovering her power."
President of Actors' Equity Association In 2024, Shields was elected the president of the
Actors' Equity Association and starred in the
Netflix film
Mother of the Bride opposite
Miranda Cosgrove. In October 2025, Shields singled out South Park creators
Trey Parker and
Matt Stone for paying unfair wages and subjecting workers to a less safe environment at their
Lakewood, Colorado restaurant
Casa Bonita. with 57 AEA performers at the restaurant beginning a labor strike which will last at least three days on October 30, 2025. ==Other media==