Brooke Shields

Brooke Shields is an actress and model best known for her breakthrough role in The Blue Lagoon.

Brooke Christa Camille Shields was born on May 31, 1965, in New York City. Her mother, Teri Shields, was an actress and successful model who arranged a first modeling assignment for her daughter when Brooke was just eleven months old. There was showbiz in the blood on the other side of her family too, with her paternal grandfather, Frank Shields, a one-time tennis star who also did a bit of acting). Meanwhile her grandmother, Marina Torlonia, was an Italian aristocrat descended from Henri IV of France and Lucrezia Borgia.

Throughout the 1970s Shields enjoyed a successful career as a child model. At the age of fourteen she became the youngest model ever to appear on the cover of Vogue, where she would go on to be seen another twelve times, and within the year she had done the same with Cosmopolitan. She also advertised Calvin Klein jeans in a controversially sexy campaign. But if censors were concerned about that, they hadn't seen the half of it. By then Shields had already appeared in two TV movies and the Alfred Sole film Alice, Sweet Alice. But it was her nude scenes in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (some of which were filmed when she was just twelve) that really caused a scandal; a scandal that dramatically raised her profile.

Three years later she capitalized on this with The Blue Lagoon, in which she and Christopher Atkins played children marooned on an idyllic island, growing up together and discovering sex. The film made her a star. It also led to her appearing before a U.S. Congressional inquiry, but she testified that older body doubles had been used for the more controversial scenes. In the same year, true to her precocious nature, she went on to become the youngest ever guest star on The Muppet Show.

In the mid 1980s Shields took time out from acting to study French literature at Princeton. Upon returning, she was never quite able to recapture the success of her early career, but she nevertheless appeared in several notable films, including Running Wild, with Martin Sheen and Renée Estevez; Black and White, with Robert Downey Jr. and Claudia Schiffer; and The Bachelor, with Chris O'Donnell and Renee Zellweger. She also enjoyed a solid career in television, appearing in series such as Quantum Leap, with Scott Bakula; Just Shoot Me!, with Laura San Giacomo and George Segal; and That '70s Show, with Mila Kunis, Danny Masterson, and Laura Prepon. She starred as Susan Keane in the long-running comedy Suddenly Susan.

Shields has also made headlines with her personal life. She has been romantically linked with several other celebrities including Michael Jackson, Woody Harrelson, Dean Cain, Liam Neeson, John Travolta, Michael Bolton, John F. Kennedy Jr., and PrincesAlbert of Monaco. In 1997 she married tennis star Andre Agassi, but relations between the couple disintegrated and the marriage was later annulled so that Shields could marry again without compromising her Catholic faith. Her second husband was writer and producer Chris Henchy, with whom she has had two daughters: Rowan Francis and Grier Hammond.

After the birth of Rowan she suffered from severe post-partum depression, a subject which she discussed publicly to try and help other women. She found her own solution via anti-depressant medication, famously drawing criticism from Tom Cruise, for which he has since apologized. Shields has written a book on the subject, Down Came the Rain: A Mother's Story of Depression and Recovery. Shields is also the author of On Your Own and The Brooke Book.

YUDDY