Brooke Shields on a mission to help women reclaim their power

When The Sunday Post catches up with the world’s most photographed woman at her Manhattan townhouse, she is cradling a mug of tea emblazoned with Scotland’s Saltire and munching digestive biscuits. She only wishes they were “tablet”.

Dubbed “The face of the ’80s”, Calvin Klein model and movie star Brooke Shields has Scottish blood in her veins and became hooked on the national sweet treat while filming the 2021 movie A Castle For Christmas at Dalmeny House in South Queensferry.

It’s the story of an American author who journeys to Scotland where she falls in love with a castle and its grumpy duke. And Brooke remembered with a giggle the day the film’s dialect coach, brought in to help co-star Cary Elwes with his Scottish accent, introduced her to the home-made sweet: “She came up to me one day and said, ‘Do you care for tablet?’

“I replied: ‘Thank you so much, but I have an iPad, and a phone and my computer.’ Then she smiled and said: ‘Oh, sweet girl, no, tablet!’ and brought out the Tupperware with the tablet inside. I popped it into my mouth and thought: ‘What is this?’ It was like I saw God for the first time,” she laughed.

Cary Elwes and Brooke Shields in Castle for Christmas (Pic: Mark Mainz / Netflix)

And she revealed it was at a ceilidh with cast and crew where she danced for the first time after breaking her leg in a freak accident.

The Blue Lagoon star, who in 2005 played Roxie Hart in the long-running musical Chicago at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End, explained she had just finished a physical fitness challenge and was demonstrating how to use a balancing ball when she was distracted and lost her balance.

“I flew up, five feet in the air and landed on my femur,” she explained. “I was in hospital for a month, I had an infection and a blood clot, and no one could visit me because it was the time of Covid. It took about a year before I could really walk.”

She was newly recovered when filming in Scotland where, because of the pandemic, the cast lived either on or close to location.

“We were only allowed to socialise with each other,” she remembered. “At the end of every Friday, our transport guys would come, and we would have a ceilidh. These big guys in their kilts would teach us the dances.

“When you have a really bad injury like this, you just don’t know if you are ever going to dance again, and to me dancing is like breathing.”

It was the Eightsome Reel that allowed her to “breathe” again. Reliving the moment, she said: “Learning that first ceilidh dance, I just started crying because I was so happy.”

Scotland holds special memories. “For three months we’d have parties, and knitting sessions, and I’d collect sea glass on a little rock beach,” she said. “It was just beautiful.”

Brooke Shields as Sophie in Castle for Christmas

Those moments of private joy are clearly precious to the child star whose 59 years have been played out in the public arena. Her career started as a baby in TV soap commercials, before she went on to become an actress, famed for her beauty.

One of her most notable and controversial roles was in the 1978 movie Pretty Baby, a Cannes Palme d’Or winner, in which, at the age of 12, she played a child prostitute – a role for which her single mother and manager, Teri Shields, was lambasted.

The 2023 documentary on the film traced Brooke’s life from a sexualised young girl to a Princeton graduate, and her complex relationship with her mother and manager.

Once dubbed “a cultural phenomenon”, Brooke says everything changed in her mid-50s, when, like so many women, she was becoming invisible. Now, as she approaches her 60th birthday, Brooke has written a new memoir to challenge age-related bias. Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old reveals how she feels more comfortable in her skin, more empowered and confident than she did decades ago.

This is, she says, the time for women to reclaim their power and decide how they want to live.

Brimming with candour, humour and optimism, the book weaves together research and reporting with her own experiences to reveal how liberating later life can, and should, be. And she is proof of her own pudding, having launched her own hair care company, Commence, of which she is CEO.

Brooke was married to tennis ace Andre Agassi but they divorced and in 2001 she married Chris Henchy, 60, with whom she has daughters Rowan, 21, and Grier, 18.

She delivers her new book with the same raw honesty she exhibits in 2005’s Down Came The Rain, about her struggle with postpartum depression after becoming a mother for the first time at 37, and There Was A Little Girl: The Real Story Of My Mother And Me (2014), which traces her life with Shields, who suffered from alcoholism and died aged 79 in 2012.

Teri, who parted with Brooke’s aristocratic father, Francis, when Brooke was a baby, refused alimony, instead insisting he fund their daughter’s education.

Brooke told P.S: “I feel very lucky, but people love painting a victim, they love a tragic story.

“I always said that the most difficult part for me was loving an alcoholic. I don’t believe in being a victim. I believe we all go through really difficult things in our lives. Mine happened to have been played out on a public stage.”

She describes her mother as “this beautiful woman from New Jersey who lived through the Depression, barely graduating from grammar school, with a horrible mother and no opportunity at all”.

She tells how her mother “translated” her own misfortune into fortune for the daughter she adored. “It defies all odds. I feel so lucky because it could have gone the other way, my story could have looked a lot different,” she told P.S.

“Now as I am getting older, and through much help in myriad different ways, I am realising as well that I did play a part in it. Something about me had resilience that was able to translate all of that into a solid existence.

“My mum was strong but tragic. Underneath her strength and bravado was this deep insecurity, about her value and her lack of education. She crafted a life she never thought she’d have for herself for me, this baby who happened to be pretty and that made these things easier for both of us.

“The only torture in it was fearing I was going to lose her. The issue now I understand as a mother and older woman is the treatment process for these types of addictions is based in a punitive approach. It very often doesn’t get to the genesis of the problem.

“My mother went to therapy, but it was all so painful for her. Alcohol is an escape and addiction a prison.

“As a child my mother was my favourite human being on the Earth, and we had a lot of fun. People didn’t want that to be my story. I think it’s 99% projection from the press and the outside world. It is so much easier to opt for that narrative.”

What would her mum make of the new book?

“She would say she wasn’t in it enough,” Brooke chuckled. “She would think she had a lot to do with my forthright approach and honesty. I think she would be proud, and she would laugh.

“I hope women read it and come out of it going: ‘Yeah, you know what, I’m pretty terrific. I have my own story.’ I want every woman to be full of themselves and say: ‘OK, s**t happens, but I am still here, what do I want to do now?’ I want them to look at themselves and say ‘wow’ and go forward.”

Age is no barrier

Brooke Shields approaches her 60th birthday in May as the CEO of her own newly launched company. Clearly age is no barrier to ambition and new adventure.

She recently told US media: “Self-improvement, no matter what that means to you, is great. I’m all for it. But our society has become so myopically focused on youth, we lose sight of the value that comes with age and experience and time.”

Of Commence she said: “I started it to see what would happen for women over 40 to just talk about where they are in their lives and what they love and don’t love and how they think the world treats them.

“What I realised was people love beauty. There are different obstacles we face in this era of our lives, especially with hair and scalp health, and the way that piece of your identity can be challenged is difficult for so many of us. I never thought I would be in beauty, and I’m not motivated to do skin care yet, but hair care and scalp health were just really important in this community.

“Every woman asked me about my hair, and my eyebrows, and how they’ve changed throughout my life. And so, we created a line of hair care for women over 40, all plant-based. The efficacy is amazing.”

Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old: Thoughts On Ageing As A Woman, by Brooke Shields, is published by Macmillan.