Brooke Shields recalls horrifying moment fan tried to cut off her hair while promoting controversial film aged 12
Brooke Shields has opened up about the horrifying moment a fan tried to cut off her hair when she was at a screening of Pretty Baby aged 12.
Shields began modelling when she was less than one-year-old and bagged her first major movie role in Pretty Baby at the age of 11.
In the 1978 movie, Shields plays a sexually-exploited child who lives at a brothel in 1917 New Orleans.
The controversial movie saw Shields appear nude in several scenes, while she also kissed her then-27-year-old co-star Keith Carradine.
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In the 2024 documentary Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, Carradine admitted that there was ‘no way that film would be made today'.
"Nor should we," he added.
Shields has spoken candidly of the impact the movie had on her life and career, saying she was pigeonholed as some kind of 'sex symbol' even at such a young age.
In a new interview, she recalled a genuinely terrifying moment that happened while she was promoting the movie at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival when she was just 12.
"There was such a frenzy about me," the actor said on The Bossticks podcast.
"And it was crowds of people… them trying to cut off my hair, and it was insane."
She went on to tell the podcast’s shocked hosts that she believed the fans were trying to get their hands on a ‘piece of her’.
The 61-year-old said the experience was almost enough to put her off acting ever again.
"My mom and I were like, 'Nope, never again. No more movies for us. Go back to modelling,'" she said.
In her 2014 memoir There Was a Little Girl, Shields shared more details on the horrific incident, explaining that she was attempting to walk through the 'disorderly' crowd with her mother’s friend Bob Karsian when it happened.
"Out of the corner of my eye I saw a hand and a glimmer of metal," she wrote.
"A fan had reached out to me and grabbed a clump of my hair and was just about to cut it off with a pair of scissors. Bob karate-chopped the arm away and I escaped."
Karisian has also opened up about the creepy incident, telling reporters in 1978 that the male fan later apologised for attempting to cut the young star’s hair and told him: "I don't know what made me do that.”
Shields has previously said the 1978 film festival was an event ‘that would scar me for life’ and that it was 'years' before she could attend the annual film festival again.
Claire Reid