Brooke Shields on ageing in Hollywood: 'You’re either the hot girl or the woman with dentures'

That explains the title of her latest tome: Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Ageing as a Woman. Unsolicited opinions about her age and appearance are par for the course, so much so that Shields has had some of them printed on the book’s back cover. "She looks strange. It’s unfortunate, because she was beautiful," says one. "It’s hard to believe she was pretty at one time," opines another.

"It was my idea," she recalls. "I don’t normally read them and I said I don’t really feel like doing the research on this, but if somebody from the publishing house can dig up some of the most ridiculous quotes, let’s look at them. There was one that they didn’t put in, which I thought was hysterical, which was ‘She’s aged like sour milk’. I have to laugh at these things, right?"

There’s a twist to this tale, though, because Brooke Shields is actually all the more beautiful for being a warm, wise-cracking, occasionally sweary fount of midlife wisdom, both in her book and during our conversation. For anyone who has watched old interviews with a young and understandably guarded Shields, it comes as a surprise. "I’m sharing it more coming into this era. It’s not a case of, ‘I’ve been like this and now I’m coming out as that’. It’s just more of me," she explains.

The advent of social media means that, these days, she also gets to reply to the haters. "I was doing an Instagram Live the other day for the book. You know how the comments just fly by, and you’ve got to read one and reply? One of them said, ‘I really wish you looked like you used to look.’ And I replied, ‘Read the title of the book, please.’ Another was, ‘Where’s your mother?’ And I was like, ‘Ah, that’s interesting. Dead. Dead. That’s my answer.'"

As that answer suggests, Shields is less keen to please these days. The book chronicles how she has learnt to say no to things she’s uncomfortable with, as well as an empathetic yes to things she isn’t. Like many women of her age, she’s learnt to be kinder to herself, too.

"I don’t mind being funny, because I am," she says. "I’m a dorky person in many ways. I’ll do something and I’ll think that was so not cool, but it’s just part of who I am. When you physically put yourself down, though – I used to say, ‘I’m the big girl… I’ve got man hands’ and it was funny – you start thinking, ‘That’s not fair.’ If your daughter said that about herself, you would put her in the corner and say, ‘Do not do that.'"

Shields really is funny, as anyone who has seen her standout turn as Joey’s date Erika Ford in Friends can attest. Her book is peppered with amusing anecdotes – including one about a dramatic rescue by Bradley Cooper. And after the recent flurry of releases about the menopause and the invisibility of women over 40, the tone is refreshingly optimistic.

"It’s great that we’re having conversations about menopause and we’re demystifying it, but it’s not all we are," she says. "There’s a feeling that, if you’re not the young hot girl at the bar, then you must be the woman with dentures – or you’re just ‘menopause’."

It was this societal categorisation of women that led to the book. "I was in the throes of beginning my [haircare] company Commence, going through all of the machinations of what it really is to have a startup and how it’s not for the meek, and that whole struggle became very interesting to my agents. They said, ‘Hey, what about this idea of what it’s like to start a company in your 50s?’

"My first reaction was, that’s not going to be enough of a book, who really cares? Why is it so shocking that a woman in her 50s can take on a new endeavour? It’s like [they think] you took one foot out of the grave and decided to do this, you know? I thought, ‘Well, that’s making me insanely angry.’"

Digging into it, she found that "the narrative we’ve been fed has only focused on negativity. Less than one per cent of all marketing has a woman over 60 in it. But the millennials are turning 40, so this aggregate number of who we are, starting at 40, is just getting bigger and bigger. I think we’re formidable, and I think people are worried we’re going to take over the world".

With Shields’s attitude, that seems possible.

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