Brooke Shields has spent a lot of her life being pleasant. As a preteen, she smiled courteously as journalists inquired about whether she felt oversexualized and exploited in films like 1978’s Pretty Baby and her instantly iconic Calvin Klein ads two years later. She was the dutiful daughter to her mother and manager, Teri, whose alcoholism made their close bond indescribably complex.
She smiled for the cameras when they followed her to Princeton University in 1985 and asked (as if it were their business) about her being a virgin. Young Brooke Shields was a master of standing out and being sweet. As she grew up, she continued to shine but used her voice more defiantly — most memorably in a 2005 New York Times op-ed response to Tom Cruise’s attack on her use of antidepressants during postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter, Rowan. She showed her comedy chops in four seasons of her NBC sitcom, Suddenly Susan, and multiple Broadway shows. She published two New York Times bestselling memoirs. Then she had the nerve to do something (apparently) unexpected: She kept getting older. Though her confidence and joy grew as she aged — she turns 60 this spring — she writes in her new book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman (on sale Tuesday, January 14), “I began to notice that external perceptions didn’t seem to match up with my internal sense of self. My industry no longer received me with the same enthusiasm I had come to expect. The vibe from casting agents and producers, but also my fans, was more: You need to stop time… and maybe even reverse it.” To borrow a phrase from her book, f--- that. Frustrated by “being overlooked at the exact moment I was feeling in my prime,” as she writes, she added a new entry to her résumé in 2024: founder and CEO of Commence, an online community and haircare brand designed for women over 4