The actress was only 12 when she played a sexually-exploited girl living at a brothel in Louis Malle’s controversial film.

Brooke Shields recalls ‘frenzy’ as fan tried to ‘cut off my hair’ at Pretty Baby screening in 1978

The actress was only 12 when she played a sexually-exploited girl living at a brothel in Louis Malle's controversial film.

By Kathleen Perricone

June 1, 2026 8:03 p.m. ET

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Brooke Shields recounts 'Pretty Baby' incident with fan. Credit:

Paramount Pictures/Fotos International/Getty; The Bossticks/YouTube

- Brooke Shields recalled the "frenzy" over her as a 12-year-old actress at a screening of *Pretty Baby* at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.

- Fans wanted "a piece" of her, she revealed, adding that one even attempted "to cut off my hair."

- *Pretty Baby*, about a girl raised in a brothel, remains controversial due to its explicit sexual nature.

The making of *Pretty Baby* had its ugly moments, which Brooke Shields has been candid about over the years. But in a new interview, she recounted a truly terrifying moment while promoting the controversial film in May 1978.

Shields, then 12, attended the Cannes Film Festival alongside costars Susan Sarandon and Keith Carradine for a screening of the historical drama, about the sexual exploitation of a young girl in 1917 New Orleans. *Pretty Baby* had been banned in many countries for its explicitness, particularly nude scenes featuring the underage Shields, but that didn't deter overzealous fans in the French Riviera.

Brooke Shields and Susan Sarandon in 'Pretty Baby'.

Paramount/Getty

"There was such a frenzy about me," the actress recalled Monday on *The Bossticks* podcast. "And it was crowds of people… them trying to cut off my hair, and it was insane."

As she clarified to the shocked hosts, Lauryn and Michael Bosstick, the fans "wanted a piece" of her.

The encounter was so "ridiculous," Shields nearly swore off acting altogether. "My mom and I were like, 'Nope, never again. No more movies for us. Go back to modeling,'" she recalled.

Brooke Shields and Keith Carradine (left) walking in Cannes on May 20, 1978.

Bertrand LAFORET/Gamma-Rapho via Getty

Since the age of 11 months, Shields had been working as a child model, managed by her single mother Teri. In 1976, the 10-year-old made her feature film debut in the slasher *Alice, Sweet, Alice*, and the following year she was cast in *Pretty Baby*, French director Louis Malle's first American production.

But the "difficult, difficult shoot" — five sweltering months on location in New Orleans — proved to be "so intensive," admitted Shields.

This isn't the first time the *Suddenly Susan** *actress has opened up about the "frenzy" at Cannes. In her 2014 memoir, *There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me*, Shields described it as an event "that would scar me for life."

As she recounted, the crowd at *Pretty Baby*'s screening was "so big and disorderly that I was almost trampled.” While walking into the auditorium, the preteen was flanked by Teri and her mother's "companion" Bob Karsian, who was forced to act as her bodyguard as they "pushed through" a wall of people.

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"Out of the corner of my eye I saw a hand and a glimmer of metal," Shields wrote in *There Was a Little Girl**.* "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."

Karsian also spoke to the press about the scary encounter, saying he had "to beat people off" the 12-year-old. As for the man who attempted to snip her hair, he apologized and admitted, "I don't know what made me do that," recalled Karsian.

Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in 1978's 'Pretty Baby'.

Paramount/Getty

In the melee, all but two of the buttons on his tuxedo shirt popped off. Inside the theater, Teri used an eyebrow pencil to draw black dots on Karsian's white shirt to give the illusion of buttons, Shields remembered in her book.

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"We would eventually laugh at this," she wrote, "but it would take me twenty years to even consider returning to the Cannes Film Festival.”

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