Brooke Shields’ First Kiss Was to a 29-Year-Old Actor When She Was 11

Brooke Shields’ Hollywood journey speaks volumes about the ways young girls have been sexualized and exploited in Tinseltown and beyond.

In Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a two-part documentary premiering April 3 on Hulu, the actress and activist opens up about her deeply unsettling modeling and acting career, from a family friend trying to publish nude photos of her taken at 10 years of age (he successfully won the right to do so in court), to appearing nude at 15 in the 1980 film Blue Lagoon.

“The film and Brooke’s story, to me, is not only about Hollywood. It’s about the objectification of girls and women in general,” says director Lana Wilson (Miss Americana). “Brooke is a nuclear version of what it’s like to be treated as a beautiful object, objectified by millions of people without them even being conscious of it. What the documentary asks is: what kind of psychological impact does that have on a person?”

At the age of 11, Shields was cast as a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, a 1978 film directed by the late French filmmaker Louis Malle. In the film, she is presented on a platter and auctioned off to the highest bidder. In another scene, she kisses the actor Keith Carradine, a grown man. She had never kissed anyone before.

“This is a moment I wanted to feature and unpack because, even if child Brooke was fully cognizant of the role she was playing, and even if she realized that acting was pretend, I can’t help but think: ‘This is an actual 11-year-old girl having to kiss an actual 29-year-old man,’” says Wilson. “That inescapably is real. And the impact of that is real, too. Eleven-year-old Brooke expressed discomfort during the filming of this moment, but that discomfort was not taken seriously by the director.”

See Brooke Shields discuss that disturbing scene in this exclusive clip from Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields: