The films that made Brooke Shields famous asked her to be looked at and very little else, and she obliged. The actor turned out to be elsewhere: in television comedy, nearly twenty years later, where she was at last allowed to be funny on purpose.
Fi1m perspective
In The Blue Lagoon (1980) Brooke Shields has one face for wonder and another for alarm, and Randal Kleiser asks her for nothing else. She was fourteen. The script hands her a string of questions about her own body, and she delivers them like someone who has been told the island will do the acting for her. It does not. Néstor Almendros photographs the lagoon so well that the water carries the film, and the two people standing in it are mostly asked to stand.
That was the pattern, and it had already been set. In Pretty Baby (1978), made when she was eleven or twelve, Louis Malle cast her as Violet, a child prostitute in a period drama, and the notice she got there was for a natural presence rather than anything she had been taught. Endless Love (1981), for Franco Zeffirelli, made it three films in four years about a girl's sexual awakening in a period or isolated setting. Critics at the time said what we would say now: the films were more interested in the fact of her than in anything she might do, and they demanded almost nothing of her as an actor. She then left for university, and when she came back in 1987 the roles that had been available to a famous teenager were not waiting for a graduate.
The turn came in 1996, and it came through comedy. A guest spot on Friends, as Erika Ford, a stalker who cannot tell Joey from the character he plays on television, got her the lead in Suddenly Susan (1996–2000) on NBC, opposite Judd Nelson. The writing was uneven and borrowed, and the reviews said so; they also kept singling her out, for timing and for a willingness to fall over that nobody had thought to ask of her before. Broadway followed, in Grease, Chicago, Cabaret and Wonderful Town, which is roughly the career of a working musical-comedy performer and a long way from the lagoon.
Watching The Blue Lagoon again, what we felt most was sorry for her, which is not what a film about first love is after. The reason is on the screen: a fourteen-year-old answering questions no script should put to her, as prettily as instructed, with a director who had just made Grease trusting the scenery to supply what he had not. She said as much herself years later, talking to Christopher Atkins on her podcast: a film like that would never be made again, because it would not be allowed.
So the films the reader is most likely to click on are the ones in which she is least present as an actor, and the work that shows what she can do is on television, in short scenes, getting a laugh. If you want to see her act, look for the comedy. The lagoon is still there, and it is still beautiful, and it still has nothing to do with her.
Biography
Brooke Shields is an American actress and model. She began modelling as an infant and made her feature film debut in Alice, Sweet Alice (1976). At the age of fourteen she starred as Emmeline Lestrange in the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon.
Shields later appeared in Pretty Baby (1978) and Endless Love (1981). She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Romance languages in 1987. On television she starred in the sitcom Suddenly Susan (1996–2000) and has made guest appearances in series including Friends, That '70s Show and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
