Cruise sings the sorry song, mends friendship with Brooke Shields

A year of couch-hopping, psychiatry-bashing and scientology propagation later, Tom Cruise has gone into the damage control mode, starting with apologizing to actress Brooke Shields for slamming her use of antidepressants to get relief from post-partum depression.

“He came over to my house, and he gave me a heartfelt apology. He apologized for bringing me into the whole thing and for everything that happened. And through it all, I was so impressed with how heartfelt it was,” Shields said to funnyman Jay Leno on the Tonight Show on Friday.

Earlier last year, 42-year-old Cruise, while appearing on talk shows to promote War of the Worlds, had blasted 41-year-old Shields for taking Paxil to cope with the blues after her first daughter Rowan Francis was born. So deep was her depression that the actress even penned a book Down Came The Rain: My Journey Through Post-Partum Depression about her childbirth experience. But the psychiatry-bashing Cruise was vocal about his disapproval of The Blue Lagoon actress' decision.

“Look at her life. Here is a woman – and I care about Brooke Shields because I think she is incredibly talented – you look at where has her career gone?” he said on the Today Show. “She doesn't understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn't understand in the same way that you don't understand it, Matt,” he ranted while picking a beef with host Matt Lauer for not agreeing with the tenets of scientology. He suggested overcoming post partum depression with 'vitamins' and 'exercise'.

The actress retorted that Cruise should stick to 'fighting aliens' and “let mothers decide the best way to treat postpartum depression”. She also passed nasty comments about the actor's affair with a much younger Katie Holmes and wrote in a sarcastic column in a leading New York daily, “I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Mr Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression.” But all the venom seemed to have gone out of Shields when Cruise decided to apologize.

“I didn't feel at any time that I had to defend myself, nor did I feel that he was trying to convince me of anything other than the fact that he was deeply sorry. And I accepted it,” she said. Incidentally, Shields delivered a second daughter Grier Hammond on the same day and in the same hospital as Holmes did her daughter Suri with Cruise.

Confirming the development, Cruise's publicist Arnold Robinson said, “It is true that his friendship with Shields has been mended.” But the actor wasn't ready to go all the way and take back his comments about antidepressants. “He has not changed his position about antidepressants, which, as evidenced by the black label warnings issued by the FDA on these types of drugs, are unhealthy,” Robinson said of Cruise.

It's not just Shields who's irked by Cruise's behavior. Recently, Paramount Pictures terminated a 14-year-old association with the Mission: Impossible actor due to his 'recent conduct' that was 'unacceptable'.

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