After spending nearly 60 years in the spotlight, Brooke Shields seems to be comfortable in her role as an internationally recognized celebrity—and will even crack the occasional joke about it.
During a recent interview with BBC’s Influential with Katty Kay that aired on Feb. 21, the model and actress was reminded of her very first modeling gig at 11 months old, when she appeared in an ad for Ivory soap.
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“I was the original influencer,” Shields joked to British journalist Katty Kay.
When the show’s host asked Shields how it felt, looking back, to have so much attention as a child, the Mother of the Bride star said it was “odd” but noted her early career helped her family financially.
“In this day and age where everybody’s hyper-focused on everything all the time, you know, it seems par for the course,” she said of her early fame. “But for it to have been the focal point for almost 60 years—” the mom of two interrupted herself briefly to laugh before continuing, “it’s odd. But, you know, it was a poignant time when that’s how we made a living.”
Related: Brooke Shields Reveals Blunt Advice She Gave Model Daughter About ‘Hard and Thankless’ Profession
The 59-year-old actress pointed out that her first modeling job wasn’t an opportunity she campaigned to secure for herself. “I had no idea what I was doing at 11 months old. I wasn’t exactly ambitious then,” she joked. “And it’s an interesting trajectory because, what if that hadn’t happened? What if I didn’t get the Ivory soap ad?”
Despite having fame so early in her life, Shields said that her family helped her find ways to enjoy being a kid by enrolling her in “regular schools” and bringing her stepsister or friends along when she had to travel for work to normalize the experience. She later credited those efforts when Kay asked how she managed to stay “levelheaded about life.”
“That topic has surprisingly come up a lot,” said Shields, who has been doing press for the last few months in support of her new memoir Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, which she released in January.
“It was a perfect storm, in a way,” she continued. “I think there were many factors that contributed: living in New York, going to regular schools, being raised by parents who had very strong standards for their own selves and for their children.”
Shields added that “there was a stubbornness” within her “that didn’t want anybody else to win.”
“The negativity in the press, and the vitriol, and the attacks, and the drugs and the alcohol and all these things—I wasn’t going to let that win, because then I would have been a victim to something, and that infuriated me,” she explained.
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