Backhanded compliment from Andre Agassi weighed heavily on Brooke Shields
Brooke Shields explains in her new memoir how ex-husband, tennis great Andre Agassi, played a backhand about her weight that added to her long-term body image issues.
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Brooke Shields explains in her new memoir how ex-husband, tennis great Andre Agassi, played a backhand about her weight that added to her long-term body image issues.
“I was very specifically told I was not runway worthy, because I wasn’t skinny enough,” Shields wrote in Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old. “Being told you are ‘the face,’ you begin to believe that’s all you are – a face.
“From the neck up, I was Brooke Shields, but it was like my body existed in a different reality.”
The 59-year-old shared her body image struggles with the tennis pro but, according to the Pretty Baby star, the eight-time grand slam champ did not provide the assurance she sought.
“When I would profess my insecurities to my first husband, he would always say, ‘I wish you could see yourself the way I see you,’” she recalled.
“However, when I said ‘Will you still love me if I’m big and fat?’ (I meant once I got pregnant – an unfair question for anybody to ask another person I know!) I could never have expected his response.”
Shields wrote his backhanded compliment went: “I love you too much to let you get big and fat!”
“I definitely did not see that coming and must admit I started to spin a bit,” she wrote. “But we all know how that relationship turned out.”
The couple married in 1997 and divorced two years later.
Shields later married director, producer and screenwriter Chris Henchy, and they share daughters Rowan, 21, and Grier, 18.
The actor is “glad” she didn’t have any children with Agassi during their short-lived union.
“‘Be thankful we didn’t have children,’ he said, ‘because I would not have made this easy for you’,” she recalled.
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