A feud with Brooke Shields has erupted after Cruise criticised her in a television interview for taking antidepressants to help her cope with postnatal depression. Shields is currently appearing in the musical Chicago in London and has a two-year-old daughter, Rowan.

“Here is a woman — and I care about Brooke Shields because she is an incredibly talented woman — where has her career gone?” Cruise said somewhat gratuitously on Access Hollywood, while promoting Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, in which he stars.

“These drugs are dangerous. I have actually helped people come off them,” he said. “When you talk about postpartum depression you can take people today, women, and what you do is you use vitamins.”

Shields, 39, was the star of the early 1980s romance Endless Love, a film in which Cruise had a bit part. She had her own successful sitcom, Suddenly Susan, starred in Cabaret on stage in New York and was married to Andre Agassi, the tennis player, for two years. She married Chris Henchy, a writer, in 2001 and gave birth to Rowan two years later.

Until Cruise took a swipe at her, she had been under the impression her career was going well. “Tom Cruise’s comments are irresponsible and dangerous,” Shields said in London last week. “Tom should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women who are experiencing postpartum depression decide what treatment options are best for them.”

Shields was referring to Cruise’s new sci-fi film, but she might have equally been thinking of Scientology, his religion, one aspect of which teaches that Xenu, an extraterrestrial, brought aliens to earth and exterminated them with hydrogen bombs but their souls stuck to the bodies of humans.

At a more earthly level, Scientologists oppose taking drugs for psychiatric problems and believe high doses of vitamins and minerals offer a better cure.

Mike Faenza, president of the National Mental Health Association in America, said: “Tom Cruise is a talented actor, but his comments were destructive.”

In her new book, Down Came the Rain, Shields writes frankly of her self-hatred and rejection of her daughter. Driving home one day with Rowan in the back seat she felt so desperate she got “the terrible feeling I was going to ram my car into the wall”. On another occasion she thought of committing suicide with her daughter by jumping out of a window. “I concluded it wouldn’t be too effective, because we weren’t high enough. This upset me even more.”

Shields was in a soap commercial when she was 11 months old. She went on to play a prostitute at the age of 12 in Pretty Baby. She had a tumultuous upbringing as a child star, although she went on to study French at Princeton, an Ivy League university.

Having a child was not easy. After suffering a miscarriage and undergoing fertility treatment, she expected to be overjoyed when her daughter was born. Her hostile feelings came as a shock and affected her relationship with her husband.

“Damage gets done,” she writes. “The baby is fine . . . but other people in my life, my husband, if I have a bad day he looks at me, thinking, ‘Oh God, it is going to come back again.”

Shields was reluctant to try antidepressants but was persuaded by a therapist and found her mood eventually lightened. She is now hoping to have a second child.

Critics have been kind to Shields — her story is told with “candour and grace”, according to the Los Angeles Times — but Cruise has come in for heavy fire. Already under attack for his public wooing of Katie Holmes, star of the forthcoming Batman Begins, which cynics have interpreted as a publicity stunt, his comments about Shields have appeared equally out of character.

“Has Tom Cruise got a medical degree in his spare time?” asked one commentator.

Faenza said Cruise’s remarks were a reason why people found it so difficult to speak openly about their mental health problems.

“Brooke Shields was brave to come forward,” he said, “and she’s had a famous person make negative comments about her.”

Additional reporting: Tom Pattinson

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