Actress Brooke Shields has baby girl

Brooke Shields and husband Chris Henchy. Picture / Reuters

LOS ANGELES - Actress Brooke Shields, whose first experience as a mother led to write a book about postpartum depression, gave birth on Tuesday to her second child with TV writer Chris Henchy, her publicist said.

The 40-year-old actress and her husband named their new daughter Grier Hammond Henchy, the couple said in a statement issued through People magazine.

Shields, who burst onto the Hollywood scene playing a child prostitute in the 1978 film "Pretty Baby" and went to star in her own television sitcom, "Suddenly Susan," gave birth to her first daughter, Rowan, in May 2003.

She chronicled her post-natal emotional difficulties in the book "Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression."

In it, Shields revealed taking anti-depressants for treatment of extreme despair and suicidal thoughts, an admission that actor Tom Cruise later criticized publicly in explaining his own skepticism about psychiatry as part of his belief in the Church of Scientology.

Shields fired back in a New York Times opinion column published in July 2005, rebuking Cruise's comments as a "ridiculous rant" and a "disservice to mothers everywhere."

"I wasn't thrilled to be taking drugs. In fact, I prematurely stopped taking them and had a relapse that almost led me to drive my car into a wall with Rowan in the backseat. But the drugs, along with weekly therapy sessions, are what saved me - and my family," she wrote.

Ironically, the arrival of Shields' second daughter came on the same day as the delivery of Cruise's first biological child, a daughter born to his finacee, actress Katie Holmes.

Shields, who previously wed tennis star Andre Agassi, married Henchy in 2001. Last year, she starred in a Broadway production of the hit musical "Chicago."

- REUTERS