It took nearly 60 years for Brooke Shields to overcome her imposter syndrome

In the new series of Influential with Katty Kay, actress and model Brooke Shields opens up about spending nearly six decades in the spotlight and how she finally overcame her imposter syndrome.

More than 40 years after Time magazine called her the face of a decade in a 1981 cover story, actress and model Brooke Shields says that she’s finally confident enough to not feel like a failure. Speaking to the BBC’s Katty Kay for her interview series Influential, Shields opens up about everything from landing an Ivory soap campaign as an infant to the fallout from that infamous Time photo shoot.

In 2023, a Hulu documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, offered a glimpse into the reality behind the tabloid headlines, centering on the relationship between Shields and her late mother, Teri. With a new book released on 14 January, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, Shields comes into her own and embraces the difficult task of ageing in the public eye.

Having been working since she was an infant (on the aforementioned soap ad), Shields says her public association with youthful beauty – those iconic eyebrows and big hair – has made the ageing process even more of a challenge. “[Having] a youthful face, just regularly getting older is almost viewed as a disappointment,” she tells Kay. “I think, psychologically, it’s a very interesting thing… You really have to do a lot of work on yourself internally to be OK with not also being disappointed with yourself.”

Shields had early success as a model (she posed for Calvin Klein and Richard Avedon aged 15) and then as an actress, when she starred in films like The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981).

“I was the original influencer, actually,” she jokes.

Since then, she has parlayed her fame into partnerships with skincare brands, launched her own haircare line, Commence, and an online platform for women over 40, Beginning is Now. It’s that community that she’s embracing with her new book, with the realisation that some are starting to see her as a 59-year-old, not just the girl who starred in Pretty Baby.

Being so strongly associated with a decade hasn’t helped shift public perception, even though she has worked consistently since then. “It was a shock to me the first time I saw a wrinkle on a monitor, because I thought something was in the film,” she says, revealing that she sometimes mistakenly believed she was immune to the passage of time. “I knew that I had to find value beyond the surface and looks and beauty, because it was such a part of my upbringing and who I was to people.”

Shields acknowledges that she’s spent much of her life keeping up appearances, but she’s had the privilege to see that Hollywood’s focus on eternal youth isn’t necessarily a universally held belief around the world.

“It’s definitely a very American thing. I think you go to Europe – I’m not sure about the UK as much, but definitely in Italy and France – there is a certain respect and reverence for beauty, mature beauty,” she says. “We don’t – we have not figured that out yet. I think, I hope it’s changing a bit. I’m hoping to contribute to that.”

She calls aging liberating, not limiting. While Hollywood has been more welcoming of women of a certain age – just look at Demi Moore, Martha Stewart and Jennifer Coolidge’s recent renaissances – Shields explains that there’s a selfishness that arrives when things like children and career pressures aren’t on the agenda anymore.

“I think that there’s a freedom to it and there’s so many different factors that when you delve into them, you understand why this is a prime of our life in a way that is focused on just us,” she says. “Not our biological clock, not societal pressures, not all of these things that we operate by – because your time runs out.”

Shields’s career since the 90s has been marked by focused diversification; exploring ways to find success away from her appearance. Her CV includes a Broadway stint in shows like Chicago, Cabaret and Grease, in addition to her TV and film work. She has published two children’s books and written about postpartum depression. She is also mother to two daughters, Grier and Rowan, and earned a degree in Romance languages and literatures from Princeton University.

“When you start to write books or take jobs in other mediums and you learn different skills, [like] Broadway, speaking, all of those things that sort of add to you as a human being, the onus on just looking a certain way or on [being] ‘the face of a decade’, which is ridiculous in and of itself,” she says. “I was a pretty face but you know, really?”

Shields says this self-reflection is what allowed her to finally feel able to rub shoulders with her peers. She tells Kay that during an event for the opening of Sunset Boulevard with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, she realised that she could hold her own. The imposter syndrome that had loomed over her years in the spotlight had evaporated.

“Everything that I’ve done and been and seen and grown from and learned gives me the opportunity to not be intimidated by any of these people in these rooms. I can admire them and I can look up to them and love their talent,” Shields says. “I can be good enough. I’m as good as [whomever] I used to hold up on a pedestal.” 

Influential with Katty Kay airs on Fridays at 21:30 ET on the BBC News channel.