Featured Image Credit: Doug Peters / Allstar Picture Library Ltd / Alamy
Topics: Brooke Shields, Film and TV, Celebrity, Documentaries
Callum Jones
Topics: Brooke Shields, Film and TV, Celebrity, Documentaries
Brooke Shields has opened up on what her co-star said to her before an underage kiss with him.
The actor's early years in the spotlight were documented in her new documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, where Shields' first kiss was discussed.
For a lot of us, that first kiss is something we will never forget, and I'm sure Shields is certainly in that camp, as her first kiss was with an actor three times her age.
The rather uncomfortable moment happened while she was filming 1978's Pretty Baby, which sees a young Shields playing a child prostitute, who is later auctioned and bought by Ernest Belloqc, played by Keith Carradine.
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The scene was quite a surprising one, but one that was pretty significant, according to the film's director Lana Wilson.
Speaking of the moment in Shields' documentary, she said: "This is a moment I wanted to feature and unpack because, even if child Brooke was fully cognisant 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.
"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."
Shields has actually spoken about how she was exploited in films as a child, but Pretty Baby was certainly not one of them.
In fact, Carradine, who was 29 at the time, has been praised by Shields for taking 'such good care' of her while filming the rather controversial scenes.
Speaking on The Drew Barrymore Show recently, Shields explained: "It was about these males needing me to be in a certain category [of beauty] to serve their story. And it never was about me.
"It was never protective of me. It was fun and loving at times, but it was ― I was just there. I was a pawn."
She added: "Keith Carradine took such good care of me. He looked at me and he said, 'You know, this doesn’t count as a first kiss.'
"That was gracious and protective and caring on a level that I don’t even think I knew at the time. I'd never kissed a boy before."
If wasn't all easy for Shields in the 70s classic, as she opened up in her new Hulu documentary on how she struggled to film the intimate scenes.