Brooke Shields was left “broken” trying to keep her alcoholic mum Teri Shields alive.
The 57-year-old “Endless Love” actress opened up in her new documentary, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields”, about how her mother’s drinking drained her while she was growing up. She shared more harrowing details about her traumatic upbringing in an interview on “Today”.
She said about Teri, who was Brooke’s manager until 1995 when her addiction forced the actress to fire her: “As a daughter, I was so busy trying to keep her alive and protect her against the world.
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“I was in that role with her and she was so broken, and even as a child I had, not pity, in a bad way, but respectful pity, if there’s such a thing.
“I was like, ‘what a shame, you have demons and I don’t want you to’.”
Brooke also told how she had staged the first intervention for her mother at the age of 13.
She said the other struggles she went through had made her the woman she was today: “I would only erase my mother's alcoholism, because that was such a constant source of agony for me.
“But all the other stuff put me in a position now, albeit quite a few years later … to be like, ‘Yeah, bring it on. You cannot throw me. I am here and I’m going to keep going.’”
Brooke said in her Hulu documentary – which also details how she was raped in her 20s by a film executive at his hotel room – “You never know what to expect with an alcoholic.
“It wasn’t abusive, but it was emotionally abusive because I felt sort of abandoned every time she wasn’t herself.”
Brooke’s mum Teri, who died in 2012 at the age of 79, agreed to stop drinking, but Brooke said it didn’t last beyond a few weeks.