The former child star on Hollywood’s ridiculous expectations of women – at every age

From an early age, the model and actor Brooke Shields has been accustomed to seeing herself through the eyes of others. At 11, she played a teenage prostitute in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, at 14 a castaway discovering sex in The Blue Lagoon, and had her face licensed to doll manufacturers in the 1980s. When she was 15, Barbara Walters asked her about her measurements on national TV.

Shields had hoped that, by her late 50s, those days of physical scrutiny would be behind her. Yet now she finds herself fending off judgment about her age. Recently, she was at a party where the male host was crestfallen when she told him the year she was born – 1965 – and said he wished she hadn’t mentioned it. “The fact that I, presumably someone he remembers best as a pin-up from his childhood, could be close to 60 ruined something fundamental for him,” Shields notes. “The implication was that I should keep my ‘vintage’ a secret or be ashamed that I have the audacity to be almost 60, because that meant I could no longer be the dream girl or have sex appeal.”