Through the connections of her manager mother, a former model, The Few landed her first professional modeling job before her first birthday when she was selected to pose for advertisements for Ivory Snow photographed by Francesco Scavullo. Within two years, the toddler was a pro on the runways as well and was later featured as a Breck girl and in Colgate commercials shot by Richard Avedon. With her thick eyebrows, sensual pouty lips, lustrous hair and bright eyes, Shields projected the image of a Lolita while off-screen she was a conservative Catholic girl. When Louis Malle tapped her for the title role of a child prostitute in "Pretty Baby" (1978), a drama loosely inspired by the life of photographer E.J. Bellocq, she became embroiled in controversy, partly over the overt sensuality of her role and partly for her somewhat innocent nude scenes (such as a shot of the actress emerging from a bathtub).

Shields attempted to demonstrate a more wholesome persona co-starring with George Burns in "Just You and Me, Kid" (1979) and featured appearances in numerous TV variety specials headlined by veteran comic Bob Hope. Yet she reverted to teen vamp for the 1980 remake of "The Blue Lagoon" and Franco Zefferelli's overwrought adaptation of "Endless Love" (1981). By the time she enrolled at Princeton in 1983, Shields was considered more of a personality than an actress and the few movies she made during her college years (e.g., "Sahara" 1984; "Brenda Starr" filmed in 1986 but released in 1989) merely confirmed that opinion. (It also didn't help that her beauty and modeling work had landed her on the cover of TIME magazine as "the face of the 80s".) She was equally famous for a chapter in a 1984 book she penned ("On Your Own") in which she extolled the virtues of remaining a virgin.

As the 1990s rolled around, Shields worked hard to dispel those images. She effectively portrayed a stalking victim in the 1993 CBS movie "I Can Make You Love Me: The Stalking of Laura Black" and surprised many with her Broadway musical debut as bad girl Betty Rizzo in a revival of "Grease" in 1995. A well-received guest turn as a rabid soap opera fan on a two-part episode of "Friends" awoke many to her capabilities as a light comedienne and Shields soon was fielding offers for sitcoms. She opted to portray a San Franciscan journalist coping as a single woman in the NBC series "Suddenly Susan" (1996-2000). While the sitcom had a promising beginning, it quickly deteriorated into banality becoming the butt of jokes and critical derision.

The actress was unstoppable, though, and during each hiatus squeezed in at least one feature. Shields offered a nice turn as a snooty socialite at first willing to marry Chris O'Donnell until she learns of the terms in "The Bachelor" (1999). She also offered a strong turn as a documentary filmmaker following a group of white urban kids enthralled by hip-hop culture in James Toback's messy and uneven "Black and White" (also 1999). In "The Weekend" (filmed in 1998 but released in 2000), she was cast as a daughter who constantly disappoints her critical mother (Gena Rowlands while the 2001 Lifetime TV movie "What Makes a Family" offered her a juicy role as a lesbian single parent.