Child actors often stumble into adulthood, but Brooke Shields is the exception. It’s all because she’s stubborn, she insists, though she’s hovered in the public eye since she was a toddler.
“I think all those pieces were sort of like a perfect storm for me,” she says, in a hotel cottage surrounded by roses, salvia and day lilies.
“I don’t know why I didn’t get derailed. I don’t know. I’m stubborn that way, and I think I didn’t want to become a statistic. I was going to prove everybody wrong. ‘Oh, yeah? Well watch me.’ In a way that’s how I got a degree. Nobody thought I could do it. I got a degree, and it was in a different language because I was a bit stubborn and didn’t want to fail. Everybody said I wouldn’t make it. Everybody did,” she says.
Midcareer Shields left acting to earn her bachelor’s degree from Princeton in French literature. Afterward she returned to performing, heading her own sitcom, “Suddenly Susan,” which ran for four years.
“Even my first time on Broadway they said, ‘Aw, she’s going to suck. She’s going to be horrible.’ And that over the course of decades, time and time again, it fueled me,” she says.
“Part of it is my ego and part of it is just being stubborn and not wanting to be defeated. There were manners; there was protocol for a person in the world, in society. You did not go to someone’s house without bringing mints, or a cake or whatever. You did that. It didn’t matter what socioeconomic world you were in, you thanked people for giving you gifts. My kids get so mad, ‘Awww it’s thank-you notes time?’ ‘Yeah, sit down. We’re doing it.'”
Doing it is what she’s always done — carefully balancing the real with the surreal.
“I’m very aware. I’ve always been aware of what is around me, where people are not being truthful. What is BS, what is not. I never lived in Hollywood. I always went to regular schools, and I think just the normalcy that I always had as a balance to the more bohemian life of movie-making, even modeling, I always had manners and rules,” says Shields, wearing black slacks and a gray cardigan.
“And my father, Stanley, was very strict. And I could clearly switch — I was a Gemini,” she says, laughing. “I think at a very young age I was exposed to balance and craved it.”
Now as the mother of two daughters, 10 and 13, Shields is meticulous about her commitments.
Her latest movie, Hallmark Channel’s “Flower Shop Mystery: Dearly Depotted,” premiering June 26, marks the first job she’s accepted that took her away from the children for weeks at a time.
Primary is her 15-year marriage to producer-writer Chris Henchy and her children. “I do get to come home on the weekends but they usually come with me so I usually travel in the summers and I work. But when I did ‘Lipstick Jungle’ it was easy because I was in the city. This takes me out of the city and out of their daily life and that was a bit scary for me,” she says.
She and Henchy carefully orchestrate their schedules. “Going away I talked to my kids about it. We sat down and I said, ‘You know we have a lot of good things in our lives. And we are very privileged, but it’s because your mom and dad work. That vacation we’re going to take is not free. You know you’ll always be with one of us. We love you dearly and we need to keep this thing going.’ … They have outbreaks and everything else because they’re kids. But they want to know they’re being heard. That’s the biggest thing I’ve learned from having young kids is that sometimes it’s just about listening.”
Parenthood was a hard earned privilege for Shields. Before her children were born she suffered a miscarriage. It changed her, she says. “I think I felt less innocent. I woke up and thought, ‘I’m a little angry.’ I’ve never been angry before. ‘I’m a little jaded. I’m a little mad at the system.’ I always had that, ‘Well, things happen and it’s OK. Move on.’
“But this was something that undid me, and I got a little bit of a chip in my heart. It got a little darker. I think there’s strength you have from being positive, but there’s strength through being hardened. I don’t think you ever get over it. You go on, you keep life going.”
ABC is looking for actors
Friday is the deadline for would-be actors to post their videos to ABCDiscovers.com to compete in ABC’s annual search for undiscovered talent. You must re-create a scene that you’ll find on the website and prove yourself to be the hot new thespian who’s been loitering in the shadows. The winner will earn a $25,000 talent deal with ABC. Nice work if you can get it.
Inspector Morse reprieve
If you remember Inspector Morse from PBS’ “Masterpiece Mystery!” you probably know that the actor who played him, John Thaw, died at 60 in 2002.
So producers have contrived to monitor the younger Morse when he was just beginning to love Beethoven and solve crimes. “Endeavour,” returns Sunday for its third season.
Shaun Evans, who plays the young Morse, says he wasn’t intimidated by taking on a role so well defined by Thaw.
“When you’re given a great opportunity there’s no time to be wasted being full of fear. You have to make the most of it. I also think I didn’t even feel the pressure because I thought my first introduction to Morse and the character was through the books. When they called me about it, I knew of the films. I read all of the books first, and so it felt like something that could be very fresh and something that was just my own. Obviously not just my own, but it felt like I could do my own thing with it, to a degree. So I wasn’t daunted at all.”
‘Saul’ walks on wild side
Bob Odenkirk, who’s so funny as Saul in “Better Call Saul,” is doing an about-face with a new role.
He’ll star as journalist David Carr in “The Night of the Gun,” a memoir written by Carr about his cocaine addiction. Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”) will serve as executive producer along with Odenkirk, and will write the six-part miniseries for AMC.
