Shields was born in New York City into a well-known American society family with links to Italian and French nobility. Her grandmother was the Italian princess Donna Marina Torlonia. Her parents, Frank Shields and Teri, divorced when she was 2 years old. She has two step-brothers and three half-sisters. During her early years, Shields lived at 73 W. 59th St. in Manhattan. When Brooke was only five days old, her mother decided she was going to have a show business career. According to her mother, "She was the most beautiful child", and she was going to help her with her career. When she was 8 years old, Brooke Shields posed nude; and, at age 10, she was paid $45 to appear in Playboy.
At age 12, Shields played a child prostitute her age. At age 16, she had already worked for 16 years and had made more money than the President of the United States. Eileen Ford, founder of the Ford Modeling Agency, said of Brooke Shields: ...She is a professional child and unique. She looks like an adult and thinks like one.
The pretty baby is twelve-year-old Violet, played by Brooke Shields. Violet has grown in the environment of a circa World War I brothel in New Orleans, where her mother Hattie (Susan Sarandon) practices the oldest of professions. The first scene of the movie shows Violet's strikingly beautiful face in the dark, lit beautifully, warmly from the side. We hear moaning of a woman, and see Violet watching solemnly. Gradually the sounds change into cries of pain, and we see it's a woman in labor that Violet is watching. The baby is a boy.
Shields' first major film role was her 1978 appearance in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, a movie in which she played a child who lived in a brothel (and in which there were numerous nude scenes). Because she was only 12 when the film was released, and possibly 11 when it was filmed, questions were raised about child pornography. This was followed by a slightly less controversial and less notable film, Wanda Nevada (1979)
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