Brooke's Tell-all Menopause And Me!

She feels sexier than ever at 53

- Heather Hodson

Brooke Shields is sitting in a New York photo studio, eating lunch and talking about menopause. “I’ll take anything as long as I don’t have to have one of these hot flashes,” she grimaces. “I so cannot handle those.”

Mention menopause and most actresses would head for the door, but Brooke has no filter. The mum-of-two will talk about almost anything, whether it’s alcoholism or fertility. “The first mourning that I went through was realising I wasn’t going to have any more children,” she says. “That threw me.”

The actress is also funny, demonstrating the same self-deprecating humour that made her a hit on ’90s sitcom Suddenly Susan. And she’s still got the luminous complexion, that lion’s mane of hair and those grey-green eyes set wide under bushy brows.

At 53 – her frame sculpted by regular yoga and boxing sessions – she’s also in great shape, which is just as well. In between starring in TV comedy Jane the Virgin and satirical rom-com My Boyfriend’s Meds, she’s been curating art exhibitions and working on her own clothing line. Brooke’s life, it seems, is speeding up, not slowing down.

“I do think women in their 50s are sexier,” she says. “I don’t know what I thought it was going to be like, but I have much more of this attitude that stems from a place of confidence, like, ‘If you don’t like it, that’s not my problem.’”