Brooke Shields Reveals How She Avoided Becoming Tragic Child Star

USMagazine, Sunday, February 17, 2013, 2:00pm (PST)

Us Weekly

• Brooke Shield's trajectory from child star to full-fledged movie siren was one littered with plenty of controversy, but the veteran actress, who is mother to two young daughters of her own now, said she had a trick to keep from walking down the path of Hollywood destruction.

  "I would get invited to Studio 54, but I'd leave before all the craziness and drugs happened," she told the new issue of Haute Living. "I never saw the bag passed around. Andy Warhol and all those guys were very sweet to me. There was something about me that they wanted to protect and uphold."

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  Shields, now 47, first made her big screen debut as a child prostitute in Louis Malle's controversial Pretty Baby at the young age of 12. The actress said that even though there were plenty of naysayers surrounding the film's release, she was personally never fazed by the risque roles she took on.

  "I think that the reason why I was unfazed was because there was an innocence to the characters," she said. "In Pretty Baby the director didn't want a little Lolita, he wanted an innocent kid and he got that."

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  Even her mother Teri, who received plenty of backlash for allowing her daughter to star in the film and bare her midriff in a sexy 1980 Calvin Klein advertisement, tried to keep Shields from going down the wrong path, she said.

  "She wanted me to stay a kid for as long as possible, which may seem like a contradiction, but there was this freedom and naivety where I wasn't cognizant of things," she explained. "I wasn't cognizant enough to know that you would be insecure or uncomfortable."

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  Shields has two young daughters with husband Chris Henchy -- Rowan, 8, and Grier, 5.

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