Louis Malle's 'Pretty Baby' marked the debut of Brooke Shields's controversial acting career in 1978, when she was just twelve years old. The film was set in the red-light district of New Orleans in 1917, where Shields played Violet Nell, who was growing up in a brothel with her prostitute mother, played by Susan Sarandon. Violet was very observant of all the activities that took place in the whorehouse, so that when the time came for her virginity to be auctioned off between the brothel's clients, she was almost excited to get her "career" started. Violet falls in love with a photographer named Bellocq and eventually marries him after her mother abandoned her to move to St. Louis. 'Pretty Baby' was particularly controversial at the time because there were several nude scenes and suggested sex scenes involving the pre-pubescent Shields, and the film even garnered accusations of child pornography. Nevertheless, Shields stole the screen in the way that she didn't try to draw sympathy from the audience, merely acting how anyone would if they were too young and uneducated to realize that there was anything wrong with the way that they had been brought up.
