Brooke at 53 How she’s surviving menopause
Shefeels sexierthan everat53
Brooke Shields is sitting in a New York photo studio, eating lunch and talking about menopause. “I’ll take anything as long as I don’t have to have one of these hot flashes,” she grimaces. “I so cannot handle those.”
Mention menopause and most actresses would head for the door, but Brooke has no filter. The mum-of-two will talk about almost anything, whether it’s alcoholism or fertility. “The first mourning that I went through was realising I wasn’t going to have any more children,” she says. “That threw me.”
The actress is also funny, demonstrating the same self-deprecating humour that made her a hit on ’90s sitcom
SuddenlySusan. And she’s still got the luminous complexion, that lion’s mane of hair and those grey-green eyes set wide under bushy brows.
At 53 – her frame sculpted by regular yoga and boxing sessions – she’s also in great shape, which is just as well. In between starring in TV comedy JanetheVirgin and satirical rom-com My
Boyfriend’sMeds, she’s been curating art exhibitions and working on her own clothing line. Brooke’s life, it seems, is speeding up, not slowing down.
“I do think women in their 50s are sexier,” she says. “I don’t know what I thought it was going to be like, but I have much more of this attitude that stems from a place of confidence, like, ‘If you don’t like it, that’s not my problem.’”
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Brooke Christa Shields was born in 1965 to Frank Shields and Teri Schmon, who divorced when their daughter was just five months old. Teri never remarried, instead focusing entirely on her little girl.
They lived together in Manhattan, where Teri took Brooke to dinner clubs and Broadway shows, gave her piano, ballet and riding lessons, and ensured she was educated privately. Teri was determined to carve out a career for her daughter in the modelling and movie business, starting with a soap advertisement when Brooke was only 11 months old.
By the age of nine, the child star had won her first film role in the horror flick Alice,Sweet
Alice. Next came art-house drama PrettyBaby when she was 11, followed by comingof-age films TheBlueLagoon when she was 15 and Endless
Love when she was 16. It was playing a prostitute in PrettyBaby that got her noticed. The film was castigated for being “lolly porn” and Teri was vilified for allowing her daughter to take the role.
Brooke has always staunchly defended the movie, yet her parenting philosophy couldn’t be more different from her mother’s. She writes in her 2014 memoir ThereWasa
LittleGirl, “I myself would not allow my daughter to be photographed topless, but it was a different time.”
And Teri, she says, was fierce when it came to protecting her from the horrors exposed by the #MeToo movement.
“I had a very protective mom. They hated her because they couldn’t get to me, but that gave me a life. I was really loved by my mother. If anybody looked at me sideways, she was like, ‘I will cut your balls off and make you eat them!’”
As Brooke transitioned from child actor to teen star, she went on a date with John Travolta, hung out with best friend Michael Jackson and partied at Studio 54, but she was always back home in time to do her homework.
What did threaten to derail her youth was her mother’s alcoholism. “I felt that I could make a difference and that is the epidemic of loving an alcoholic,” she says.
Adding to the dysfunction was her mother’s financial control over Brooke’s affairs, which continued even after she’d graduated from university in 1987. Moneywise, things were rocky. “Every time I did a movie, we would buy a house in the place that we were in.”
It was Andre Agassi, the tennis star she married in 1997 and divorced two years later, who helped her gain her independence. “He gave me the strength for a slow, systematic separation from my mother.” But Brooke remained a devoted daughter and when Teri died in 2012, the actress was by her side.
In 1999, the star met screenwriter and producer Chris Henchy. They married in 2001 and within a few years, Rowan, now 15, was
born, followed by Grier, 12. She credits her spouse, 54, for keeping her calm.
“My husband’s an incredibly balancing source,” she explains. “I’m so used to having to have my own back, but it’s a relief to have someone who, if I need it, takes care of me.”
As our interview comes to an end, Brooke adds, “There’s a key thing I’ve become preoccupied with lately. I’ve spent my life trying to be humble and it has a boomerang effect if you’re not careful because the idea of being humble is dimming your light.”
It’s a lesson she’s learnt over her long career and it’s a message she’s teaching her daughters: “Don’t undermine yourself.”