In the week in which the entire international press, the big names of the film industry and the luxury brands have their eyes focused on what is happening on the red carpet of the Cannes festival, the gaze of the common spectator is focused on the Hollywood’s most unexpected phenomenon. With her first movie hit in over 25 years, Brooke Shields has become one of the biggest names of the spring thanks to The bride’s mother, the romantic comedy that breaks viewing records on Netflix these days. Paradigm of the broken toy archetype of the cinema mecca and example of resilience and survival after decades of personal and professional disappointments, the 58-year-old New York actress and model euphorically embraces a media resurrection raised by a public incapable of erasing from its memory of the teenager who captivated a generation. “We are incredibly grateful that you love this movie so much,” claimed on their social networks.
With 26 million views in just seven days, The bride’s mother It is officially the new great success of the platform, which thus reinforces an undisguised strategy to make nostalgia and its two-mile references (Lindsay Lohan, Adam Sandler or soon Cameron Diaz) the main attraction in films that combine low budgets and high audiences. Standing in the top 10 in more than 90 countries and currently occupying first place in Spain, this romantic comedy battered by critics – “It makes you want to get into the ocean so as not to continue listening to the dialogues”, wrote one of them – has managed to conquer the public by recovering a formula that is as used as it is effective: during the celebration of his daughter’s wedding in a resort paradise, a single mother discovers that her future father-in-law (Benjamin Bratt) is the man who broke her heart in college. Shields not only celebrates that a mature woman is the protagonist of a film with so many millions of viewers, but that she can also act as its romantic interest. “We have to celebrate women in this age group. “I hope it inspires many to know that this period of their lives is not the beginning of the end, but rather an opportunity to start over.” declared at the beginning of May in the magazine For the.
She is the best example of that opportunity to write a new vital page. Shields herself called it a “miracle” to have survived a career that she started extremely early, starring in an advertisement for a soap brand at just 11 months old. With her mother Teri as managera divorced and drink-addicted model who saw in her daughter the solution to her financial problems, little Brooke was exploited and hypersexualized to the point of appearing naked in artistic photographs that ended up on the pages of the magazine Playboy when he was only 10 years old. A few months later she would release the film The little onein which she works as a prostitute and was censored in several cities for exhibiting “child pornography,” and in 1980 her popularity skyrocketed with the box-office hit The blue lake, where she appears practically naked for most of the footage. “In her they see both innocence and the sexy girl. “It is the forbidden fruit, everything in one, and it is very appetizing,” corroborated his mother in a television program of the time. Her daughter, however, always claimed to have felt protected by her.
Brooke became a cultural icon, the epitome of modern-day femininity. She was the youngest to grace the cover of the American edition of VogueMagazine Time He chose her as the face of eighties fashion in one of his acts and at the age of 15 he shocked the United States with a Calvin Klein jeans advertisement that ended up being censored on several television networks for its erotic insinuations. “Do you want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” the teenage model maintained as she writhed for the camera. According to the press at the time, she pocketed $10,000 a day.
Her media popularity, added to her friendship with Michael Jackson or George Michael and her presence at Studio 54 parties alongside myths like Andy Warhol, made her the very young sweetheart of America. But at the peak of her fame, and just as she came of age, she decided to stop. In an unusual move for the time, she put her acting career on hold to graduate with honors in Romance Languages at the prestigious Princeton University. Hollywood would not forgive him for her hiatus.
“When I finished I assumed that I would return to shooting one film a year. She thought, ‘I’m smart, they’ll love a smart actress.’ But when she returned it was like night and day. I didn’t start from scratch, but from minus 10. I couldn’t find roles because they didn’t understand what I was. Model? Actress? It was a very difficult moment for me,” the New Yorker reflected in an interview. Last year, Shields revealed for the first time that, after having dinner with a film producer to plan her return to the industry, he pounced on her in her hotel room and raped her. “I didn’t fight much. I was frozen. A ‘no’ would have been enough, but I just thought, ‘Stay alive and then you’re gone.’ “I just kept quiet and waited,” recalled the artist, who had just turned 20 at the time. Later, her brief, tumultuous marriage to tennis player Andre Agassi—trophies flew off the shelf frequently—and her return to Broadway and television reinstated a star status that soon faded again.
Shields has been off the radar of big Hollywood since then and, although she has never retired from the mecca of cinema, her opportunities have been limited to her work as a voice actor for animated works, episodic characters in series and some protagonists in television films with aspirations to set the scene after dinner. However, since last year’s release of the celebrated documentary about her life, Brooke Shields: The most beautiful woman, the Manhattan company has decided to take advantage of the opportunity to return to the front line and this summer will launch its brand Commence, a line of hair products especially designed for women over 40 years of age. In addition to having more than two million followers On Instagram, also accompanies her 19-year-old daughter Grier’s first steps as a model. The young woman is the youngest of her two children with producer and screenwriter Chris Henchy, whom she married in 2001, and together they have already starred in campaigns for brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Victoria’s Secret. Although she has someone to succeed her, for now she is not thinking about her retirement.
