Brooke Shields gives birth
2006-04-19 08:56
Los Angeles - Actress Brooke Shields, who publicly battled Tom Cruise over post-partum depression, had a baby girl on Tuesday, her publicist said, just as Cruise welcomed his own daughter into the world.
Shields, 40, gave birth to her second child with her husband Chris Henchy, 42, Pat Kingsley said.
"Brooke Shields gave birth this morning in Los Angeles to baby daughter, Grier Hammond Henchy, who weighed seven pounds (3.18kg) and was 20 inches (50.8cm) long," Kingsley said. "All are doing beautifully."
Shields gave birth just as Cruise's fiancée Katie Holmes delivered a baby girl with almost identical dimensions just a few miles from Shields in Los Angeles.
The two movie stars last year engaged in an acrimonious public battle through the US media over Shields's use of anti-depressants to tackle a severe bout of post-natal depression following the 2003 birth of her daughter Rowan.
In an interview, 43-year-old Cruise, an ardent member of the Church of Scientology, criticised Shields' use of an anti-depressant to get through her depression.
As a Scientologist, Cruise does not believe in psychiatry or the use of medication such as anti-depressants, and he called Shields irresponsible for publicising her use of them in a book she wrote.
Cruise suggested she should have tried vitamins instead.
Shields fired back, branding Cruise's comments "dangerous" and saying that he was unqualified to talk about post-partum depression, a condition to which he is unlikely to fall victim.
Sultry beauty Shields shot to fame as the child star of Louis Malle's 1978 drama Pretty Baby, and followed that with the sexy 1980 hit The Blue Lagoon.
She crossed paths with Top Gun heartthrob Cruise when they co-starred in Franco Zeffirelli's 1981 film Endless Love.
Shields, who went on to become a star of her own television sitcom Suddenly Susan, married Henchy in 2001.