Fans have always known who Brooke Shields is, but now they are finding out more about her. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a new documentary on Hulu, looks at Brooke’s life, including her complicated relationship with Teri Shields, who is both her mother and her manager.
Who was Teri Shields, Brooke Shields’ mother? Teri Shields was from Newark, New Jersey, and she was an actress and model. In 1964, she married a businessman and Revlon executive named Francis Alexander Shields.
A few months later, they split up, but in 1965, their daughter Brooke was born. The mother and daughter lived in New York City on the Upper East Side.
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Teri became Brooke’s manager, and she gave her the go-ahead for a number of projects, including her big break in 1978’s Pretty Baby. In 1980, Teri also agreed to let her daughter play a part in Blue Lagoon.
When Did Brooke Shields Fire Her Mother From Her Job as Her Manager?
Brooke Shields wrote about her relationship with her mother in detail in her 2014 memoir, There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me.
She wrote –
“Nearly everything I did was for her, in response to her, because of her, or in spite of her.”
“I was either emulating her or trying to define my independence from her. I was either trying to escape her or crash into her.”
Because her mother was an alcoholic in the mid-1990s, Brooke had to fire her. In the Hulu documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, she talks about how she got along with her mother.
In January 2023, the documentary was shown for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival. It was added to Hulu on April 3rd.
What Caused Teri Shields’s Dea†h?
On October 31, 2012, Teri Shields died after a long battle with dementia. She had turned 79. Brooke said in a statement following her mother’s dea†h, according to PEOPLE –
“My mother was an enormous part of my life and of who I am today.”
“I loved her, laughed with her, and respected her. And although she had her share of struggles, she was my mom.”
The dementia battle Teri Shields fought is a poignant lesson to treasure our memories and the people in our lives while we still can.