Brooke Shields

Brooke is the daughter of the actress Teri Shields (Maria Theresia Schmonn) and of the late Francis Alexander Shields. Her grandfather was Frank (Francis Xavier ) Shields, a tennis champion who became a movie actor. Brooke has three half-sisters, Marina, Olimpia and Christina, and is also a second cousin of Glenn Close.

Brooke's career began with a soap commercial. She went on to became famous as a Calvin Klein model and in the movie Pretty Baby (1978). She was later named as Time magazine's 'Face of the Eighties'.

Brooke is a graduate of Princeton, where she majored in French Literature and dated Dean Cain. She later stepped out with John F. Kennedy Jr, Prince Albert II of Monaco (a distant cousin), Liam Neeson and Michael Jackson. Her first husband was the tennis player Andre Agassi (1997 to 1999), and her second the screen-writer Chris Henchy (since 2001). They now have two daughters, called Rowan and Grier (born in 2003 and 2006).

Brooke's grandmother was an Italian princess, Donna Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi, who married her grandfather, Francis Xavier Shields, after they met at a tennis championship in Rome. That is how Brooke comes to be descended from the famous poisoner Lucrezia Borgia and also from a gallery of historical figures, including Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and several medieval kings of France. Brooke is a second cousin of King Juan Carlos of Spain, and another of her second cousins, Sibilla Weiller, is married to the younger brother of the reigning Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Marina Torlonia's American mother, Elsie Moore, was a great-aunt of the actress Glenn Close.