Rise to Fame
The Calvin Klein campaign got banned by ABC and CBS in 1980, which meant every news outlet had to explain why, and suddenly everyone knew who she was. She was 14. She's said she had no idea the ads read as sexual at the time, which tells you everything about how she got famous: adults marketing a child's body to other adults, with the child largely out of the loop. She didn't make herself a star. She was made into one.
In the Spotlight
The 2023 Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields wasn't a nostalgia tour. For the first time publicly, she disclosed a sexual assault by a Hollywood executive she met in her 20s. The doc landed at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. She was elected president of Actors' Equity Association in 2024 and published a memoir about aging in 2025. Her current position is the opposite of fading gracefully: she's getting louder about everything she wasn't allowed to say earlier.
Side Notes
In 1983, she left Hollywood for Princeton, graduated with honors in French literature in 1987, and wrote her senior thesis on Louis Malle, the director who cast her in Pretty Baby. That's either a sign of extraordinary self-awareness or the best academic joke ever. Tom Cruise's 2005 attack on her use of antidepressants for postpartum depression gave her something she rarely had growing up: a clear villain, a public platform, and an obvious side for the audience to be on.