Just when I’ve started getting over my lifelong aversion to Tom Cruise, thanks to his star turn as an old dog with new tricks in Top Gun: Maverick, he has to ruin it all by turning up in Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields – Hulu’s new two-part documentary about the all-American model and actress. Shields landed her first job when she was 11 months old, shot to global fame at the age of 11, and was declared “the 80s look” by Time Magazine aged just 16.
One of the most affecting parts of the documentary comes in part two, when Shields looks back at the birth of her first child, Rowan. After a labour lasting more than 24 hours, which transformed into an emergency caesarean during which Shields lost “buckets of blood”, she went home and fell into a deep depression. At her lowest point, Shields later wrote that she “thought of swallowing a bottle of pills or jumping out the window of [her] apartment”. And then, while the now 57-year-old Shields is discussing her experience of postpartum, up pops Cruise, in a 2005 Today Show interview, accusing Shields of spreading “irresponsible misinformation” and promoting dangerous drug use. “Drug use” as in the antidepressants Shields was prescribed, which she credited with saving her life. “She doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry,” Cruise declared.
