Brooke Shields names the most important role of her career: “A revelation”
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(Credits: Alamy)
A spoofy sketch comedy about a single woman in San Francisco trying to make it as a writer isn’t the first thing you’d associate with the American actress and model Brooke Shields, who made her acting debut in the controversial Pretty Baby alongside Susan Sarandon at only 11 years old.
Before that, she was a child model, getting her first gig at only 11 months old when she was signed to Ivory Snow, with one of her first shoots involving modelling a brand of soap.
But here’s an actor who has her feet firmly in high and low society. Trained in the art of romance languages at Princeton University and hailing from Italian nobility, Shields has entertained the theatrics of the upper echelons of elite bohemian society, but has admitted that she prefers the goofiness of low-brow comedy.
It was this penchant for silliness that led her to Suddenly Susan, an American television sitcom which aired on NBC from 1996 to 2000. Starring Shields as Susan, a newly single woman who had abruptly left her fiancé at the altar, the show saw the titular character having to suddenly fend for herself in the working world while trying to make it as a writer, alongside a cast of classic journalism types.
Suddenly Susan was Brooke Shields’ first leading role in a TV show, and became one of her favourite productions to work on, despite having worked in several acclaimed dramas in the 1980s, including Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon and Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love. It was on this show that Shields met lifelong friends, including co-star Judd Nelson, who plays her boss and would-be brother-in-law. She also starred alongside Kathy Griffin, Néstor Carbonell and the late David Strickland, who was reportedly a good friend at the time of filming, but tragically died by suicide at the age of 29 while filming season three.
Suddenly Susan had the classic ‘nice girl trying to make it in the competitive workplace of the big city’ plotline, but the show ran with this trope and made its overtly silly antics and over-the-top storylines its signature. Speaking about the show to The National Examiner, Shields called it “a revelation”.
“I used to think I would only be credible if I was a ‘thespian’,” she said, musing, “As I got older, I realised I don’t enjoy it. I only enjoy comedy”. This explains her departure from dramas into the world of comedy, in which Shields would also later go on to lead the NBC comedy-drama Lipstick Jungle from 2008 to 2009, and play River Fields, a recurring character on American TV show Jane the Virgin, a parody of Shields’ which nods to some of her own poorly rated TV shows she had appeared in.
But Brooke Shields is no comedy spoof herself; she’s earned two Golden Globe nominations for ‘Best Actress in a Television Series—Music or Comedy’ for her role in Suddenly Susan. In her documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the model and actor opened up about having to fight to be taken seriously in the world of acting and show business, being overtly sexualised as a child and trying to find her identity away from the modelling industry.
It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, being interested in comedy and wanting to be seen as an actor worth their salt, but her charm and true talents have made her somewhat of a legendary figure in both the worlds of modelling and acting, and an enduring face in pop culture.
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