Brooke Shields: The actor Tom Cruise was forced to privately apologise to
As one of the most powerful stars in Hollywood who’s been reigning atop the A-list for an uninterrupted span of almost 40 years, Tom Cruise has proven his worth as a bankable draw and popular leading man countless times over.
On the other side of the coin, though, his reputation as the most prominent Scientologist on the planet has brought him no shortage of negative publicity, not least of all when he launched into an unprompted tirade against Brooke Shields during an appearance on The Today Show with Matt Lauer.
The pair – who had been friends since co-starring in 1981’s romantic drama Endless Love, where she was the top-billed name in the cast and he was making his feature film debut – were on opposing marketing trails at the time. He was promoting Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster War of the Worlds, and Shields was discussing the memoir Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression.
In the book, Shields explains how she used antidepressants to cope, something Cruise took exception to, as he made abundantly clear by accusing her of spreading “irresponsible misinformation” and using “mind-altering psychotropic drugs”.
The Mission: Impossible figurehead then took aim at both Shields and the pharmaceutical industry: “The thing that I’m saying about Brooke is that there’s misinformation. She doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry. I’ve never agreed with psychiatry, ever,” he said. “Before I was a Scientologist, I never agreed with psychiatry and then when I started studying the history of psychiatry, I started realising more and more why I didn’t agree with psychiatry.”
Hitting back, Shields wrote an op-ed for The New York Times where she urged Cruise “to get back to fighting aliens,” explaining that she felt “compelled to speak not just for myself but also for the hundreds of thousands of women who have suffered from post-partum depression,” but not before accurately suggesting that “I’m going to take a wild guess and say Mr. Cruise has never suffered from post-partum depression.”
Calling his comments “a disservice to mothers everywhere”, the relationship between the two was frayed for the next year until Shields and Cruise found themselves in the same hospital at the same time, with the former welcoming a daughter at the same time the latter’s own child Suri was born, with the fences mended to an extent she even attended his wedding to Katie Holmes.
In an interview with The Times, Shields confirmed that Cruise had offered his sincerest apologies: “He said, ‘I don’t know why I did it. You’ve always been nice to me. I felt cornered.’ By what? His beliefs?” she continued. “I said, ‘I don’t really want to get into a discussion about it.’ You did it – and it did not go well for you”.
The olive branch was extended, but it was another sizeable dent in the megastar’s public perception, Scientology-related or not.
