In the first part of her gloriously candid memoir in yesterday’s Mail, Brooke Shields described how age and the menopause had slammed the brakes on her sex life.
In today’s extract, the iconic beauty rails against the invisibility of mid-life women…
The first time it hit me that I’d reached ‘a certain age’ was while strolling through the streets of downtown New York with my daughters. They are, if I may be so bold, stunning girls. Rowan is a strawberry blonde with curves to die for; Grier is six feet tall, all legs, and towers over me.
We were walking side by side, me in the middle, and it was impossible not to notice the admiring looks from passers-by.
Over the years I’ve become used to being recognised on the street but this time was different: the looks weren’t cast in my direction but at the two beauties by my side.
I had every single feeling, all at once. What are you doing ogling my babies but also aren’t they gorgeous but also, wait, no one’s gazing at me? When did that happen? Am I over?
Protectiveness, pride, melancholy – it all smacked me in one quintessential New York minute.
As my forties progressed into my fifties, I began to notice that external perceptions didn’t seem to match up with my internal sense of self.
Brooke Shields at a recent awards event in New York
My industry no longer received me with the same enthusiasm. The vibe from casting agents and producers, but also my fans, was more: you need to stop time… and maybe even reverse it.
Case in point: at a routine derm- atological appointment (to get a mole checked out), the doctor, unsolicited, waved his hand around my face and said: ‘We could fix all that…’
‘All what?’ I asked.
‘You know, all the’ – cue more hand waving – ‘you know.’
What the hell? Who asked for your opinion?
I’m 59 – not even 60! I may not be playing the ingénue but I’m not exactly the grandmother in Titanic. And yet, no one knows what to do with me.
After all, Brooke Shields is not allowed to get old. The 16-year-old Calvin Klein model?
Time magazine’s face of the ’80s? It’s sacrilegious! Suddenly you have a line on your face and that one little wrinkle carries more weight than decades of accomplishments.
In 2023, at a friend-of-a-friend’s soiree, the newly divorced host offered me a walk-through of his extensive wine cellar. As he showed me different vintages, he mentioned he liked to buy bottles that commemorate significant years in his life.
‘I’m a ’72 vintage, a great year,’ he quipped, referencing the year he was born. I responded with: ‘Well, I’m a ’65. An even older vintage! I may have you beat.’
His face dropped. In a split, unsettling second, I could see him trying to reconcile 1980s Brooke Shields with the mental math that a ’65 vintage made me – gasp – 58.
‘Oh man,’ he said. ‘You really shouldn’t have told me that.’
I thought he was trying to make a joke but the way he said this sounded more like a scolding.
‘Why, because it makes you feel old?’ I asked.
‘Well yes, there’s that… ’ he said.
Only moments before, this man had been borderline flirty. But the moment he knew my actual age, the atmosphere chilled.
He presumably remembered me best as a pin-up from his childhood. Clearly I should be ashamed to be almost 60 because that meant I could no longer have sex appeal.
Well, newsflash, I’m not on this planet for the sole purpose of making you feel virile. So yes, I know there are people who take my ageing face as a physical affront. If I don’t look like the Brooke Shields that everyone knew, I’ve obviously done something horribly wrong!
For a long time, I never thought of myself as a feminist. I thought being a feminist meant you had to be angry at men.
When it comes to (at least some) men at this stage of my life, I’m not angry – I’m just disappointed.
We could certainly be met with a little more celebration when we reach our ‘later’ years.
What I’ve seen happen instead is that as we grow more comfortable with ourselves and more confident, men grow more threatened. They simply don’t know how to adjust.
As a model for Calvin Klein in the 1980s
Not long ago, I was walking down the street and passed a group of four girls taking selfies. They were positioning themselves for their best angles and I heard one of them say: ‘OK that looks good, I just don’t want any of my fat to show.’
I still can’t believe I did this but I spun on my heels and marched up to them. ‘You don’t know me,’ I said, ‘but I couldn’t help overhearing what you were saying and I just have to tell you: you are all beautiful and you have to stop doing this to yourselves.’
One lesson decades of being photographed taught me is that so many of the things we bemoan about our bodies are hardly unique to us – they’re features everyone has. They’re airbrushed out of the photos on magazine covers or movie posters.
No matter who you are, you’re not the only person with cellulite or blemishes or armpit skin that sticks out a bit when you wear a tank top. Yet we’re convinced these ‘flaws’ are the most important things about us and become obsessed with ‘fixing’ them.
At 59, I’m not immune to this urge to fixate on my least favourite parts. For example, these days when I look down at my knees and thighs, it’s as if Silly Putty has melted into a frown around my kneecaps.
When I’ve had a movie to promote or a modelling job on the horizon, I’ve found myself taping my thighs to my Spanx – pulling my skin up from my knees and adhering it to my shapewear for an immediate (and surgery-free!) lift. (I learned this trick while dancing in Broadway shows.)
I’m well aware my thigh skin has nothing to do with my value as a human but I’m not sure these girls taking selfies feel the same way.
They think their physical appearance is some sort of commentary on who they are, and that breaks my heart. Of course, o
ne reason why these girls – all girls – are so hard on themselves is that unrealistic beauty standards have become the cultural norm. And I can’t deny that I played a role in contributing to those standards.
I was in those skintight Calvins. I was on the cover of Life in 1983 in an itty-bitty red bathing suit next to the headline: BROOKE BRINGS BACK THE BIKINI.
I don’t regret doing those jobs because they paid the bills but I can look back and see that I helped perpetuate certain myths about how women should look.
What I can say with complete honesty is I didn’t realise those implications at the time. First because I was young and in many ways a victim of the same beauty standards I helped establish. But also because we weren’t having conversations like this back then.
Before walking away from those girls on the street, I offered one last piece of unsolicited advice: ‘Listen, I understand the desire to photograph yourself from what you believe are your best angles. I do the same thing. But please find what you like about yourself and focus on that.
‘Look for the qualities you can celebrate instead of fixating on the things you don’t like. I’m trying to do you a favour – I want to save you years of agony!’
The noise of self-criticism begins when we’re so young, around 12 for girls. While age hasn’t eliminated this chatter for me entirely, it’s at least turned down the volume. That seems true for most women in later life – we tend to be a little less hard on ourselves.
Yes I was labelled ‘beautiful’ at an early age but I’ve spent as much time as anyone picking apart my appearance, or wishing I looked different or was thinner.
People say to me, ‘But you were a supermodel!’ However, that’s not actually true.
I was very specifically told I wasn’t runway-worthy because I wasn’t skinny enough. (In an industry where the only acceptable size was a sample size – that’s a 24-inch waist – I was the girl being sewn into dresses from behind because the clothes wouldn’t zip.)
And being told you are ‘the face’, you begin to believe that’s all you are – a face. That you don’t have the right body. From the neck up I was Brooke Shields, but it was like my body existed in a different reality.
While I wish I could say that being on magazine covers boosted my confidence, the opposite was true. The more my looks were equated with my value, the harder I was on myself – not unlike those girls on the street.
I even used to back out of rooms because I thought my ass was too big. (Today? Who has time for that!) When I professed my insecurities to my first husband [tennis champion Andre Agassi], he’d say, ‘I wish you could see yourself the way I see you’.
However when I said, ‘Will you still love me if I’m big and fat?’ (I meant once I got pregnant) I could never have expected his response: ‘I love you too much to let you get big and fat!’
I definitely didn’t see that coming. But we all know how that relationship turned out, so let’s move on.
The truth is I’ve grown tired of being preoccupied with achieving a certain standard of beauty. It’s exhausting!
There came a day when I was simply tired of judging myself and feeling like I wasn’t enough. I was over the angst. I didn’t want to be mean to myself anymore.
What if I just assumed I was good enough as I am? Turns out, it’s liberating!
And who decides what qualifies as beautiful anyway? And how on earth does someone live up to it? And what happens when that face begins to change?
I’ve heard people walk up to my daughters and say, ‘Your mother – she used to be so beautiful.’ Uh, hi! Not dead yet!
I’m standing right here and I think I actually look rather good, thank you very much.
With Christopher Atkins in film The Blue Lagoon in 1980
Women my age (and even in their 40s) are overlooked, ignored or worse not seen at all, even though we’re one of the fastest-growing demographics in the West.
Yet we older women embody vitality. We’re smart, vibrant, powerful and ambitious.
We’re experienced, confident, capable and complicated. We’re running things.
Generally speaking, I feel more confident than I ever have. I’m more comfortable in my skin and have stopped comparing myself to this or that ideal or worrying about this or that expectation.
Do I sometimes wish all my bits had remained higher and perkier? Or that I had the same skin that appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1983? Of course I do!
Who doesn’t miss the gifts of youth? But this is a body that has carried me through a lot and I think I deserve some credit.
The last decade has at times felt like a slap in the face. Agents often tell me that I’m ‘of a certain age’ and no longer the love interest. (No s***. But newsflash, I don’t wish to be.)
In the eyes of Hollywood, I’m in no-man’s-land. As an actress in your forties or fifties you aren’t Bridget Jones but you aren’t Miss Daisy, and so you languish.
The scripts for women in midlife are about wives who’ve been cheated on because, yes, they’re getting old, or sometimes you get the bitchy boss-type part – the older, insecure woman who bullies the heroine.
Where can we watch depictions of the complex, layered lives that women live? Where are the on-screen narratives for women in their prime?
Before you write me off for wallowing in self-pity, let me point out that a 2019 study found that women over 50 were cast in zero per cent of movie leads that year. Of the character actors in those movies, only five per cent were women over 50.
And these female characters were disproportionately depicted as ‘senile’, ‘homebound’, ‘feeble’ and ‘frumpy’. Truly absurd, and so far from reality. Yet movies continue to influence how we perceive women of a certain age.
One day I was walking down the beach with one of my best male friends, basking in the glory of feeling good about myself.
‘The irony of it all,’ I said, ‘is that I’ve been insecure my whole life. Now I finally feel fit and strong in my body. I’m proud of how I look and more capable physically – but the messaging I’m getting back is that by 50 we’re finished.
‘I’m being turned down and overlooked everywhere I go. It’s like, “You’ve had a good run but now you’ve got one foot in the grave”.’
I knew this wasn’t just a ‘Brooke Shields problem’. It was a female one. My closest women friends were all in a better place than they were in their twenties or thirties but they also felt undervalued.
OK, I could starve myself or work out constantly and take whatever diet drug is making the headlines this week.
But skinniness is not the holy grail to which I want to dedicate my time. Or my money.
Neither is a procedure that takes all the years off my face. We all know how old I am and no amount of Botox is ever going to change that. (Not that I’m against it. I’ll admit that before a movie I’ll get the frown line in my forehead touched up.)
Lest I come over as preachy or even worse a hypocrite, I’m not insisting we all sit back and passively embrace all evidence of ageing when there’s something we truly don’t like.
But I’ve begun to shift my focus to what I feel comfortable with, rather than what I assume will please others. I still dye my roots. Perhaps one day I’ll be ready to cut off my locks and embrace the grey – but I’m not there yet.
I also get Fraxels, laser treatments that help to even out skin tone. Is the desire to have a face with fewer age spots a product of a society that puts too much emphasis on youth? Yes, it is.
But for now, Fraxels make me feel better about my skin, without altering how I look. (At this point, my face is what it is – chasing an aesthetic to the point of becoming unrecognisable is not my goal.)
I try to think of myself as a detailed painting. I may try to give myself a little restorative touch-up from time to time but I don’t want to erase the detail entirely.
Nor do I want to kill myself at the gym every day. I’d rather do something physical I enjoy, something that keeps my blood pumping and my muscles working and helps to prevent osteoporosis. I want to settle into the middle place, where I can accept myself, but I’m also all for each of us doing whatever we need to truly feel better about ourselves, for ourselves.
A close friend recently had a facelift after being bothered by areas of her eyes and jawline for years. I told her I hoped she’d feel great afterwards, but she suggested that I couldn’t relate.
‘Well honey,’ she said, ‘you were not born with a face that was going to need work.’ It was a reminder people assume I don’t share their insecurities about jowls or heavy eyelids or deep lines that begin at my nostrils and crevice downward. Of course I do!
I’m not ready to go under the knife any time soon but I’ll keep finding alternatives to look my best. And we need to remove the shame associated with all of it.
We shame women for not looking like they did as teens and then shame them for any intervention they undergo to look younger.
What I’ve come to realise is these ‘later’ years are about coming into your own and pivoting in the directions you’ve always wanted to go (in my case, comedy roles and starting a haircare brand).
You can finally live the life you intended as you no longer have to act in accordance with external timelines – like having children by a certain age or getting a certain job before a milestone birthday. Our time is our own. There’s nothing to ‘overcome’ about ageing. That’s the whole point! This time of our lives is something to revel in.
I won’t pretend my knees don’t ache on occasion or that I don’t have a Rolodex full of doctors. But I don’t have the worries I used to.
I’ve prioritised joy, which I hardly used to care about because I found it so fleeting. (I took everything so seriously back then. My profession. My craft. My reputation. My existence.)
The narrative we’ve been served for years is that it’s all downhill for women after a certain age. Well, the story we’ve been told is bulls***. We are the narrators of our next chapters.
Being relegated to the sidelines offers us more room – and less pressure – to fully be ourselves.
How I threw myself into TV role and made Friends cast laugh
Brooke as a stalker alongside Matt LeBlanc in Friends in 1996
Like the rest of the world, I was obsessed with Friends – and honoured and excited to be asked to appear in it.
I was worried they’d want me to play myself and relieved when, instead, I was asked to be Joey’s crazy stalker date Erika.
It was 1996. I’d never done a sitcom and was nervous and very quiet the first day.
The second day of rehearsals, I had a scene with the whole group and I watched as the cast shared all these inside jokes that made them laugh hysterically.
I ached to be included but wasn’t part of the inner circle.
They weren’t being rude, they were just a close-knit cast with funny memories and private jokes. I was a one-time character.
Still, I yearned for them to like me and think I was funny. But how?
It was as if making the Friends laugh was more important than what I was going to do with the part.
All of a sudden my ‘in’ occurred to me. Matthew Perry had this one recurring bit where he’d take a running start and, as if sliding into home base, he’d throw himself on the floor in front of a pretty girl and pretend to look up her skirt.
It never failed to get the others to laugh.
Well, during a short break from rehearsing the final scene, I decided to take my chance. I casually walked to the opposite side of the sound stage, then turned back suddenly, broke into a full run and headed straight for Matthew.
Diving to the carpet at his feet, I pulled up the bottom of one of his pant legs and pretended to peek up it. The Friends were stunned into silence. Lying on the floor, I had a moment of sheer panic.
Nice move Brooke, I thought. Who do you think you are to try to make the cast of one of the funniest shows of all time laugh!
You suck and now you’re going to get fired! (I’d heard that guests got fired all the time, as early as after the first read-through of the script.)
After what felt like 30 minutes, but which was, in actuality, only about three seconds, Matthew burst into hysterics, saying: ‘I can’t believe you just did that! That was the funniest thing ever!’
Once he broke the ice, the rest of the cast began to laugh and I was able to breathe.
Of course, that’s when I began to feel the pain of the rug burns on my knees and elbows. But it was worth it. To make Matthew laugh – it was the sweetest thing. That day, the Friends invited me to have lunch with them at the fancy commissary and go to the gym on the lot.
I’d made it in Hollywood!
- Adapted from Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old by Brooke Shields
(Piatkus, £25), out on January 14. © Brooke Shields 2025. To order a copy for £21.25 (offer valid to 25/01/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
