In the new series of Influential with Katty Kay, actress and model Brooke Shields opens up about spending nearly six decades in the spotlight and how she finally overcame her imposter syndrome.

More than 40 years after Time magazine called her the face of a decade in a 1981 cover story, actress and model Brooke Shields says that she's finally confident enough to not feel like a failure. Speaking to the BBC's Katty Kay for her interview series Influential, Shields opens up about everything from landing an Ivory soap campaign as an infant to the fallout from that infamous Time photo shoot.

In 2023, a Hulu documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, offered a glimpse into the reality behind the tabloid headlines, centering on the relationship between Shields and her late mother, Teri. With a new book released on 14 January, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Ageing as a Woman, Shields comes into her own and embraces the difficult task of ageing in the public eye.

Having been working since she was an infant (on the aforementioned soap ad), Shields says her public association with youthful beauty - those iconic eyebrows and big hair - has made the ageing process even more of a challenge. "[Having] a youthful face, just regularly getting older is almost viewed as a disappointment," she tells Kay. "I think, psychologically, it's a very interesting thing… You really have to do a lot of work on yourself internally to be OK with not also being disappointed with yourself."

Shields had early success as a model (she posed for Calvin Klein and Richard Avedon aged 15) and then as an actress, when she starred in films like The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981).

"I was the original influencer, actually," she jokes.

Since then, she has parlayed her fame into partnerships with skincare brands, launched her own haircare line, Commence, and an online platform for women over 40, Beginning is Now. It's that community that she's embracing with her new book, with the realisation that some are starting to see her as a 59-year-old, not just the girl who starred in Pretty Baby.

Being so strongly associated with a decade hasn't helped shift public perception, even though she has worked consistently since then. "It was a shock to me the first time I saw a wrinkle on a monitor, because I thought something was in the film," she says, revealing that she sometimes mistakenly believed she was immune to the passage of time. "I knew that I had to find value beyond the surface and looks and beauty, because it was such a part of my upbringing and who I was to people."

Shields acknowledges that she's spent........

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