Brooke Shields posed nude for Playboy at 10 — but she says she still feels protective of her mother, who made her do it

• Brooke Shields reflected on her relationship with her mother in a feature for The Sunday Times.
• Shields said that she had spent her life defending her alcoholic mother's bad decisions.
• Now, the actress says she no longer justifies her mother's actions but still feels protective of her.

Brooke Shields says she still feels protective of her mother despite having been made to pose nude for Playboy at 10 years old. 

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Shields reflected on her relationship with her single mother, Teri Shields, who she grew up with. According to Shields, her mother's decisions about her career exposed her to sexually explicit roles and situations, one of which was a fully-nude photoshoot for Playboy.

Shields, now 57, told The Sunday Times she still feels protective of her mother — whose struggles with alcoholism she documented in a book titled "There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me," released in 2014. 

"It's so innate when you're an only child of a single mother," Shields said. "All you want to do is love your parent and keep them alive forever, and so I wanted to protect her. And by virtue of protecting her, I was justifying everything, and that solidified that bond between us."

Shields also starred in the 1978 film "Pretty Baby," a movie about a child prostitute that Shields acted in when she was 11 years old. In Shields' new documentary "Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields," set to be released on Hulu on April 3, Shields tells her daughters that she would have never allowed them to take on a similar role.

But to this day, Shields told The Sunday Times that she found it hard to be angry with her mother because she understood what the older woman was going through. 

"Everyone always wanted me to be angry with her, but anger was just too sad for me to take when I looked at how insecure she was," Shields told The Sunday Times.

A representative for Shields did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.