| PRINCETON FAMILY
Brooke Shields On Motherhood and Her Latest Book
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INTERVIEW BY KAM WILLIAMS
ctress and author Brooke Shields is a familiar face within the entertainment industry. Starting her career at just 11 months, Shields went on to star in Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981). She also caused a sensation with her advertising campaign for Calvin Klein. Shields attended Princeton University in 1983, graduating in 1988. Following college, Shields played the title role in Suddenly Susan and appeared on Seinfeld. She has just published her latest memoir There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, written after the death of her mother, Teri Shields, in 2012. In it, Shields honestly examines her remarkable and often difficult relationship with her mother. Her previous memoir, Down Came the Rain, was a New York Times Bestseller. Childhood photos from There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.
PM: How important to you and your career has been the education you received at Princeton University? It’s been the thing that’s helped me stay standing. PM: Did classmates ask you out on dates while you were a student at Princeton? After a while. Not much my freshman year. But by my sophomore year, I had asked enough people out that they started to ask me back. PM: Princeton has eating clubs instead of fraternities. Had they begun admitting women when you arrived? Yes, although I went there in 1983, the Ivy Club was all-male when I arrived and it was still all-male when I graduated. I joined Cap & Gown. PM: Would you ever be interested in acting in a French language film given that you majored in French Literature? I would absolutely say “yes” in a second, if given the opportunity. I would take on that challenge enthusiastically and work really hard. PM: If you hadn’t entered the entertainment industry, what do you think you’d be doing today? I’ve been in the entertainment industry for so long, before I even knew that I wanted to be in it. So, it would be hard to know what else I might be doing. I probably would have still made my way into it somehow because, to me, making people laugh, and entertaining, and watching people experience storytelling is one of the most rewarding things I can imagine. So I think I would have found a way to entertain people in some capacity.
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PRINCETON FAMILY FEBRUARY 2015
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1/22/15 4:16:49 PM