My Teenage Romance With Brooke Shields

The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins Opens Up About His Off-screen Romance With His Co-star

- Paul Ewart

It’s an image that’s cemented in pop culture history: a tanned, toned, bleached-blond 18-year-old Christopher Atkins, clad only in a loincloth, clutching a similarly attired 14-year-old Brooke Shields.

Hit 1980 movie, The Blue Lagoon, told the tale of two shipwrecked innocents (played by Christopher and Brooke) on a deserted South Pacific island who discover grown-up pleasures amongst the local flora and fauna. Given its mix of sun, sand and sex, it unsurprisingly left cinemagoers’ pulses racing. And it was a similar story off-camera, too.

“Yeah, we had a little romance,” the 58-year-old actor reveals to New Idea. “It was very sweet, very innocent, and very beautiful.”

Christopher says the young pair would “collect shells, make jewellery, spend time together”.

“I mean, she was a beautiful girl – it was hard not to have romantic feelings towards her!”

And while their relationship did not continue after the movie wrapped, the two remained “close friends”.

The seeds of their romance may have been sown before Brooke even arrived on set.

“It’s what the director really wanted,” Christopher says of their relationship. “He actually taped a picture of her above my bunk, because I lived on a boat for the first two weeks before she arrived. I’d see her every night before I went to sleep and start dreaming about her.”