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Brooke Shields Recalls Jaw-Dropping Question Barbara Walters Asked Her at 15

Now 60, the actress sees such interview questions in a different light.

Cailey PetschHealth and Beauty Intern

PublishedMay 13, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

UpdatedMay 13, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

Updated May 13, 2026, 8:00 PM EDTPublished May 13, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT

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Brooke Shields, 60, opened up about an extremely uncomfortable interview question she received as a teenager.

During a 1981 interview with ABC News anchor Barbara Walters, the young actress, whose controversial film Blue Lagoon had been released just one year earlier, was asked to reveal her body measurements.

Shields recalled the interview during a May 12 appearance on Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast, Dinner’s On Me, where she was promoting her upcoming Acorn TV murder mystery special, You’re Killing Me.

As their conversation turned to Shields’s early career, Ferguson inquired about several news articles published about her. This included one focused on her mother, Teri Shields, who died in 2012, and another that shared her “entire academic record” from Princeton University.

Describing the stories as “insane,” Shields added: “Well, but I mean, it’s also insane that Barbara Walters asked me [for] my measurements.”

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During the 1981 interview in question, the trailblazing journalist asked Shields, then 15, ″Brooke, what are your measurements?"

Shields, maintaining a straight face beside her mother, replied, “I’m [5 foot 10 inches] and 120 [pounds].”

Walters then instructs the young actress to stand and show the camera how “tall and slim” she is compared to Walters, who says she is 5-foot-5 and wearing heels.

Ferguson wondered whether the legendary anchor acknowledged the uncomfortable interaction later in Shields’s career, asking, “Did you ever encounter her again, like when you did The View, or anything in later years?"

“Oh no, because that’s not in her nature,” Shields said. “Also, I took everything personally—and I still kind of do, [but] I’m much better now at not letting it affect me so much."

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She told Ferguson, “If someone asked me that now, you know, I’d come back with some kind of a quip. You have agency, and you have, you know, you have a sense of possession of yourself now in a way that you just don’t when you’re that age.”

Shields previously spoke about the incident in a 2023 interview with Kelly Clarkson.

She said, “It’s the way the press treated us and what was acceptable, whether it’s, you know, asking me my measurements on national television. And just the approach that they had in asking me questions as a 12-year-old was really just unconscionable.”

Clips of awkward interactions from pre-Internet interviews with famous women regularly go viral on social media.

In a segment from The Cher Show that frequently resurfaces on TikTok, an audience member asks Cher, then in her twenties, “What are your real measurements?”

Initially replying, “They’re not—they’re nothing,” the singer eventually relented, seemingly under pressure, and shared the numbers with the room.

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Cailey PetschHealth and Beauty Intern

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