My labia were causing me discomfort so I had them reduced. When I woke the surgeon casually said ‘I tightened you up a bit too’: In world-first interview BROOKE SHIELDS reveals horrifying op she never agreed to – and why she’s speaking out now

It feels like a film scene. I’m in a blacked-out SUV, weaving through Park Avenue traffic in New York, with Brooke Shields sitting beside me, politely urging the driver to go faster. 

‘But mind the kids with umbrellas!’ she cries, as we screech right into Central Park and the driver brakes to avoid a gaggle of unsuspecting children crossing the road.

We met two hours earlier, at a chichi Upper East Side hotel. Shields arrived after a pilates class and a trip to her doctor (‘to get some sun damage burned off my face’). 

She’s dressed entirely in black: black leggings, black cashmere hoodie, black belted mackintosh. 

The only thing that isn’t black is an amethyst ring the size of a plum on her left hand because she’s off later to the opening night of Death Becomes Her on Broadway, and purple is the show’s colour theme.

Even darkly shrouded and wearing sunglasses, she’s undeniably Brooke Shields: tall; thick hair swishing; those eyebrows (about which more later) as luxuriant as ever. 

She will turn 60 in May, and even after a quick flit to the doctor for a spot of laser work, the face that’s graced roughly a million magazine covers still looks pretty perfect to me. 

Although I shouldn’t say still, because that feels ageist, and ageing is what we’re here to discuss. 

Her new book, Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old, tackles exactly this: the tricky question of how an icon famed for her beauty since she was a child handles the process of – whisper it – ageing. 

Or at least getting older. It’s her third fairly personal book (just you wait for the chapter detailing her labial operation) after Down Came the Rain, which detailed her postnatal depression, and There Was a Little Girl, about Shields’s relationship with her mother.

Presumably she’s now written one about ageing because she’s turning 60? 

‘No,’ she replies emphatically, ‘I didn’t have any plan to write another book until I was in my 80s.’ But a couple of things happened in recent years that made her think differently.

First, she decided she finally liked herself. 

That’s right, despite the face and the body and the hair and the eyebrows and all those magazine covers and film roles and photo shoots, Shields isn’t so different from many of us: she’s spent most of her life feeling uncomfortable in her own skin. 

Too big. Too gawky. She was told she was ‘the athletic one’ and that she had ‘man hands’. ‘All that stuff is a whole file, I can just access it,’ she says, tapping her temple.

Four years ago, however, aged 55, she realised that she ‘felt pretty and sexy and confident but, like, for me’. 

She finally believed it for herself, not because anyone else was telling her. 

‘But I wasn’t being met with any positivity. Everywhere I looked, marketers were bypassing me. I get it, I’m not the ingénue any more. But I’m not quite… Helen Mirren either. I mean, I hope I’ll look like Helen Mirren [who is 79],’ Shields adds. ‘But what about this part?’

Midlife, in other words. So in 2021 she decided to start a conversation about ageing, aimed at 40- and 50-something women, by launching an Instagram account called Beginning is Now, offering perky content about wellness and the menopause, as well as kookier clips such as Brooke Don’t Cook, in which she’d demonstrate her inability to make, for example, pancakes.

There was a lot of chat about hair, she noticed – thinning hair, grey hair, dry scalps – so Beginning Is Now morphed into a website and then her business, Commence, which sells posh shampoo and conditioner (from £19 a bottle), as well as a root serum and detangler, designed for women this age. It’s currently a capsule collection. 

Are there plans to grow and become a kind of Goop? ‘No,’ she says firmly, ‘there’s a different tone, and it’s for a different age.’

The new book stems partly from Shields’s determination to give a voice to women of this demographic, but also from a party at an acquaintance’s house in New York. The host had a wine cellar which he proudly showed her, before making a (vague) joke: ‘I’m a ’72 vintage, a great year.’

‘Well, I’m a ’65. An even older vintage,’ Shields shot back, whereupon the man’s face fell. ‘In a split, unsettling second,’ she writes in her new book, ‘I could see this man trying to reconcile 80s Brooke Shields with the mental maths that a ’65 vintage made me – gasp – 58.’

‘Oh man, you really shouldn’t have told me that,’ he replied. She was furious. Was she not allowed to get old? Hence the theme – and the tongue-in-cheek title – of the book.

Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old covers an extremely broad range of topics, including, but not limited to: Shields’s belief that she has saggy knees; irregular smear tests; Catholicism; magic mushrooms; her sex drive then and now (once ‘fervent’ – now she ‘sometimes pretends to be asleep’ when her husband is in the mood); mortality; racism; her feet (painful, after various musical stints on Broadway); children; starting a business; her dog and becoming an empty nester.

Chapters are called things like ‘Sex and the Middle-Aged Woman’, in which she writes candidly about having less desire at 59. Also, ‘Bradley Cooper, Guardian Angel’, which describes a seizure Shields had in a favourite local Italian restaurant last year, thanks to low sodium levels after drinking too much water, and her coming round to discover the star holding her hand (of course, Cooper also lives in the neighbourhood); oh, and the aforementioned story about her labial surgery.

A few years after she’d had her two daughters, Shields’s gynaecologist asked if she’d ever experienced ‘discomfort’ due to her labia. She apologises for this story in the book but says that women have to get over shame about such matters and presses on. Her labia had caused discomfort and been an issue since high school (‘It’s like you’re in a boxing gym and you have two little speed bags between your legs’); her gynaecologist suggested she have reduction surgery.

Shields went to a surgeon in Los Angeles who took four hours to perform the operation and had a surprise for her when she came round. ‘I tightened you up a little bit! Gave you a little rejuvenation!’ In other words, without asking, when this medical professional was supposed to be concentrating on Shields’s labia, he’d also tightened her vagina. ‘After two kids, everything is looser,’ he told her casually, overlooking the fact that she had her daughters by C-section. ‘I was shocked… There was a real “I threw this in for free, little lady” vibe to his delivery.’

Shields thought about suing him but decided that she didn’t want it all over the papers so, a decade on, has included it in her book. She knows this is one of the details that’ll be picked out and pored over but cares less about that now. She wants to speak up so that other women suffering with the same labia issue realise they’re not alone. ‘You’ve got girls living in discomfort, thinking they’re ugly, and a guy is like, “Oh, that’s weird” and they’re f***ing ruined for the rest of their life.’

There’s a moment during our conversation when Shields says the word ‘labia’ quite loudly and a man at the adjacent table looks across, startled – very When Harry Met Sally. But then, talking about personal details publicly has never felt strange to a woman who became world-famous as a child.

She was born in Manhattan to a businessman father, Francis, and an ambitious mother from New Jersey called Teri. 

They separated when Shields was a baby, and although she saw her father while she was growing up, it was her mother who pushed her into the limelight. Shields’s first modelling job was for an Ivory soap advert, aged 11 months, and she went on to become a successful child model for brands including Colgate and Band-Aid. 

She was 11 when filming the 1978 movie Pretty Baby, which catapulted her to stardom. 

She portrayed the daughter of a prostitute, whose virginity was auctioned off in a New Orleans brothel. Shields’s first kiss was in this film, with Keith Carradine, then in his late 20s. 

Two years later, Shields starred, naked almost throughout, in Blue Lagoon, a film about the sexual awakening of two teenagers stranded on a desert island.

More suggestive modelling roles followed: for Calvin Klein (she still has the original jeans, which she can’t get into but which her daughters can) and Revlon, among other brands. 

When she was 14, she became the youngest model to grace the cover of Vogue. ‘Iconic’ is Gen-Z slang now, but in the 80s Brooke was the very definition – one of the most photographed women in the world.

Her mother was behind this juggernaut. Some would call her the original ‘momager’, although the word makes Shields roll her eyes. She also refuses to accept that she was ‘groomed’. 

One of the shocking clips in a two-part Disney documentary about her life, screened in 2023, is of a young Shields on a US chat show, sitting beside her mum, who declares, ‘Brooke’s a work of art…the world should enjoy [her].’ 

Most of us might agree that she took this to extreme lengths, allowing a photographer to shoot her daughter naked in a bathtub for Playboy when she was ten, for instance.

So many elements of Shields’s childhood seem inconceivable now. 

But she talks about her mother and the ‘complexity’ of their relationship with considered emotional intelligence; partly, perhaps, thanks to having therapy for 35 years, but also because Shields adored her, despite her mother’s alcoholism and the decisions she made for Shields as a child.

‘My feelings about my mother are so confused that to write them down with clarity would mean I had them all figured out, which I do not,’ Shields wrote at the start of her book about their relationship, published in 2014 – two years after her mother died.

Has she figured out those feelings a decade on? ‘They’re so much better now,’ she says, although she still can’t tie them up with a neat bow. 

After all, she wouldn’t have the life she has now without her mother.

‘I think the most truthful thing that almost anybody can say about [the relationship they have with] their mother is that it’s not one [thing] or the other. No one can describe it perfectly.  

‘There’s something primal about it, so there’s never going to be a resolution. She could walk in here today and it would still be confusing.’ 

Meanwhile, her mother’s ashes remain in an urn on the bar in Shields’s house.

She’s channelled the complex relationship with her mother into trying to be a better version for her own daughters, Rowan, 21, and Grier, 18. 

In the Disney documentary Shields revealed she’d been sexually assaulted in her 20s by an unnamed Hollywood executive, and hadn’t told her youngest about it before the programme was being aired, which caused a row. 

‘That wasn’t a great mom moment,’ she admits, with a grimace.

Otherwise their relationship is close. She’s told both her girls that she’ll pay for their eggs to be frozen because she says the narrative women are fed these days is ‘career, career, career’, and she knows, from her own experience with IVF, that the age of eggs is very significant. 

She says the same to any young woman who works for her. 

When I mention a recent heartbreak, she checks that I’ve frozen my own eggs. 

An audience with the star isn’t unlike an audience with an incredibly glamorous aunt or big sister.

She was married to the American tennis player André Agassi from 1997 until 1999. (The two are no longer in touch; her daughters found the very idea of their marriage hilarious when they were younger. 

‘They were, like, “Him?’’’) Then, in 1999, she met Chris Henchy, a film writer and producer, and they’ve been together ever since, seemingly happily, 23 years into their marriage, bar the odd night when she feigns sleep. 

On Shields’s Instagram feed (she has 2.2 million followers) she’s dancing with her daughters at a Taylor Swift gig, celebrating Thanksgiving with her family and exercising on her pilates reformer. 

Life looks relatively normal for a woman who could have gone off the rails, like so many child stars.

If I were a therapist, I might enquire whether any residual damage from Shields’s upbringing is funnelled into work. 

She’s still ferociously busy with her haircare business and the new book. 

Having performed musical roles on Broadway in the 90s and noughties, in 2023 she won plaudits for her one-woman cabaret-style show at New York’s Café Carlyle. 

She’s still acting in films such as 2024’s Mother of the Bride on Netflix, and last summer she became boss of the Actors’ Equity Association, which represents theatre players and directors across the US.

Why does she still work so hard, I ask, when the internet says that she’s worth $40 million? 

Shields throws her head back and cackles at the suggestion. 

‘I have to work! I’ve got to constantly find ways to make a living,’ she adds, because she has two girls at college, plus a mortgage in New York and a house in the Hamptons, and says she isn’t worth anything close to $40 million. 

So if you’re worrying about energy prices, console yourself with the fact that even Brooke Shields is feeling the pinch.

During our conversation in the hotel bar, two young girls come up separately and ask for selfies, prodded by their mothers.

‘It’s always the moms,’ Shields says under her breath, meaning they send their daughters for a picture then ask for a selfie, too.

It happens in both cases. But she’s definitely still relevant to the younger generation. ‘I’m obsessed with her eyebrows,’ a 20-something friend told me before I interviewed her.

‘They’re mine! I don’t do anything to them,’ Shields says of her famous brows. The worst aspects of ageing, she goes on, ‘are the quality of things, like the scalp. Or elasticity of the skin. Or sleep.’ 

She took a sleeping pill the night before and got six hours straight, but that’s apparently rare. 

She admits to the use of Botox in the new book, and laser treatments to even her skin tone. But otherwise she remains, well, iconic.

She’s looking for a British film project, because she loves the UK. In particular she loves PG Tips, Minstrels, Sunday roasts, TV dramas including The Crown and Downton Abbey and London black taxis – she does a great impression of a cockney cabbie.

In the meantime, life for her in New York is frantic. 

Which is why we find ourselves racing in that big, blacked-out SUV across Manhattan towards Broadway, where she has a meeting as president of the equity union. Does she ever switch off? 

‘I like needlepoint,’ she says, with a goofy, self-conscious laugh. ‘I like knitting. I can make a scarf. I’m obsessed with Hacks and Yellowstone. I love sitting on my porch and reading a novel.’

I don’t get the impression any of this happens all that much, though. Brooke Shields is a human whirlwind; ageing, yes, like we all are, but certainly not slowing down.

Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old will be published by Piatkus on Tuesday, £25. To order a copy for £21.25 until 2 February, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. 

BROOKE IN BRIEF

Biggest fear?

Leaving the world too soon.

Worst habit?

Can you call tequila a habit?

Specialist subject?

Emotions.

Guilty pleasure?

Staying up too late bingeing on a TV show.

Unsung hero?

Tweety Bird.

Best place you’ve been kissed?

Backstage after a Frank Sinatra show.

Dream home?

Downton Abbey [Highclere Castle].

Somewhere to see before you die?

Bora Bora.

Person who’d play you in a biopic?

Rachel Weisz.