Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields had a public argument years ago that the Mission: Impossible actor resolved privately, more or less.
Hollywood's public arguments are like arguments between colleagues, but with millions of viewers and a few tons of popcorn. Tom Cruise has had a few run-ins throughout his career, some of them due to his beliefs as a Scientologist.
In 2005, while promoting Steven Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds, the Mission: Impossible and Top Gun star attacked actress Brooke Shields (Women of Manhattan) on Today for taking antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression with suicidal tendencies.
As a Scientologist, Cruise does not believe in psychiatry, which led him to proclaim a considerable rant against the actress on the program. Shields responded in a New York Times column titled War of Words, parodying the title of Spielberg's film.
In it, the actress defended her position on accepting the advice of her psychiatrist, and in essence, called Tom Cruise ignorant for giving advice and opinions when he has no idea about postpartum depression and childbirth in general.
Brooke Shields reveals Tom Cruise's private apology
Although it may seem like a distant quarrel now, at the time it was a rather hot topic, especially in the United States, of course. Brooke Shields has just published her memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, where she recounts the apology offered to her by Tom Cruise, as reported by Entertainment Weekly:
"In the end, Tom Cruise apologized to me. Not publicly, which would have been the right thing to do, but he came to my house and told me he was sorry, that he was cornered by Matt Lauer and that he attacked me because he basically could. It wasn't the best apology in the world, but it's the one he was able to give me and I accepted it."
The actress stresses that the goal of her column in the New York Times was never to receive an apology from Tom Cruise, but to make visible a problem that she had gone through and that she was able to overcome.
Time passes, but Tom Cruise still occasionally has some way out of the way, such as the monumental fight he gave to some members of the Mission Impossible: Death Sentence team during the coronavirus pandemic.
