Through the connections of her manager mother, a former model, Brooke Shields landed her first professional modeling job before her first birthday when she was selected to pose for advertisements for Ivory Snow photographed by Francesco Scavullo. Within two years, the toddler was a pro on the runways as well and was later featured as a Breck girl and in Colgate commercials shot by Richard Avedon. With her thick eyebrows, sensual pouty lips, lustrous hair and bright eyes, Shields projected the image of a Lolita while off-screen she was a conservative Catholic girl. When Louis Malle tapped her for the title role of a child prostitute in "Pretty Baby" (1978), a drama loosely inspired by the life of photographer E.J. Bellocq, she became embroiled in controversy, partly over the overt sensuality of her role and partly for her somewhat innocent nude scenes (such as a shot of the actress emerging from a bathtub).

Shields attempted to demonstrate a more wholesome persona co-starring with George Burns in "Just You and Me, Kid" (1979) and featured appearances in numerous TV variety specials headlined by veteran comic Bob Hope. Yet she reverted to teen vamp for the 1980 remake of "The Blue Lagoon" and Franco Zefferelli's overwrought adaptation of "Endless Love" (1981). By the time she enrolled at Princeton in 1983, Shields was considered more of a personality than an actress and the few movies she made during her college years (e.g., "Sahara" 1984; "Brenda Starr" filmed in 1986 but released in 1989) merely confirmed that opinion. (It also didn't help that her beauty and modeling work had landed her on the cover of TIME magazine as "the face of the 80s".) She was equally famous for a chapter in a 1984 book she penned ("On Your Own") in which she extolled the virtues of remaining a virgin.

As the 1990s rolled around, Shields worked hard to dispel those images. She effectively portrayed a stalking victim in the 1993 CBS movie "I Can Make You Love Me: The Stalking of Laura Black" and surprised many with her Broadway musical debut as bad girl Betty Rizzo in a revival of "Grease" in 1995. A well-received guest turn as a rabid soap opera fan on a two-part episode of "Friends" awoke many to her capabilities as a light comedienne and Shields soon was fielding offers for sitcoms. She opted to portray a San Franciscan journalist coping as a single woman in the NBC series "Suddenly Susan" (1996-2000). While the sitcom had a promising beginning, it quickly deteriorated into banality becoming the butt of jokes and critical derision.

The actress was unstoppable, though, and during each hiatus squeezed in at least one feature. Shields offered a nice turn as a snooty socialite at first willing to marry Chris O'Donnell until she learns of the terms in "The Bachelor" (1999). She also offered a strong turn as a documentary filmmaker following a group of white urban kids enthralled by hip-hop culture in James Toback's messy and uneven "Black and White" (also 1999). In "The Weekend" (filmed in 1998 but released in 2000), she was cast as a daughter who constantly disappoints her critical mother (Gena Rowlands) while the 2001 Lifetime TV movie "What Makes a Family" offered her a juicy role as a lesbian single parent. Shields was next seen in a pair of miniseries: "Widows" (ABC, 2002) as the low-rent actress Shirley, one of the widows of three men killed while trying to steal a famous painting who join forces to find their husband's killers and finish off the job of stealing the painting; and "Gone But Not Forgotten" (2004), as a female lawyer who defends a mogul accused of being a serial killer. She also enjoyed a recurring role as the vain Pamela Burkhart, mother of Mila Kunis' character Jackie on the popular Fox sitcom "That 70s Show" beginning in 2004.

In 2005, Shields released her memoir Down Came the Rain , which chronicled her struggles with post-partum depression, including becoming dependant on anti-depressant Paxil, following the birth of her daughter Rowan in 2003. The sparked an odd public war of words with her one-time "Endless Love" costar Tom Cruise, who in an interview with "Access Hollywood" denounced Shields' use of medication--in line with the teachings of the Church of Scientology, he suggested that "vitamins" would have been a sufficient cure--and took a swipe at the state of her career. Shields fired back, calling his comments "dangerous" and suggested that people shouldn't take advice from someone who devotes his life to a worship of aliens.

The actress also had a string of successful stints on stage, beginning with her off-Broadway debut performance as Suzanne in "The Eden Cinema" in 1986. Later in her career, she wowed skeptical crticis with her replacement stint as Rizzo in the revival of "Grease" in 1995. Following a 2001 Los Angeles performance in the "Vagina Monologues" Shields was tapped to play Sally Bowls in "Cabaret" with Broadway's Roundabout Theatre Company that same year. In 2003 Shields appeared, while pregnant, in the off-Broadway production of "The Exonerated", a piece based on interviews with death row inmates. She next starred as Ruth Sherwood in the Tony-nominated Broadway revival of "Wonderful Town" at the Martin Beck Theatre in 2004 and made her London stage debut playing Roxie Hart in the West End production of "Chicago" in 2005, then returning to Broadway in the same later that year.

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