Brooke Shields: 'Pretty Baby', child prostitution film "would not be made today" and "is a great loss"
The actress says that the film is “one of the most beautiful” that she has starred in
Brooke Shields pondered playing a child prostitute in the 1978 film Pretty Baby.
The American actress, now 56, was 11 when she starred in Louis Malle's film as a girl who grows up in a brothel and is then auctioned off to the highest bidder.
She was filmed n-de and her mother, Teri, received widespread criticism for allowing her daughter to be in the film.
In a new interview with The Times Magazine, Shields stated that she believes the post-#MeToo protection elements went too far.
"I think it's too much," she said. “You watch movies like 'Pretty Baby,' you watch Zeffirelli's 'Romeo and Juliet,' or you watch any [subgenre] coming of age movie that Louis Malle did, like 'Au Revoir les Enfant's, or 'Lacombe,' 'Lucien,' or whatever. be. There was always a s-xual element to them."
“Maybe the movies I made wouldn't be made now because of so much censorship, and that's a tremendous loss. ‘Pretty Baby’ is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever acted in, and I will defend it forever.”
"I wrote my thesis on her and I'm proud of it."
Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film three out of four stars, commented at the time of its release how "'Pretty Baby' has been attacked in some quarters as child pornography. It is not. It's an evocation of a time and a place and a sad chapter of [the subgenre] Americana." He also praised Shields' performance, writing that she “...really creates a character here; its subtlety and depth are amazing.”
Shields was interviewed to promote her new movie, A Castle for Christmas, now
available on Netflix.
