Brooke Shields Recalls How Liam Neeson Proposed, Then Dumped Her
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Raoul Gatchalian/IMAGES /Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Brooke Shields has a new tell-all book coming out this week titled There Was a Little Girl that explores her relationship with her mother, her life as a child star and her celebrity romances.
In an excerpt from the book from People magazine, the actress reveals that one of her celebrity suitors was Liam Neeson.
Shields, 49, dated the 62-year-old actor in 1992 after she broke up with her Princeton University boyfriend, Dean Cain.
She admits being impressed by Neeson’s movie-star status and recalls how the Irish actor “wooed me with his brogue, his poetry and his s**ty choice of cheap Pinot Grigio wine.”
Shields writes that the relationship got serious after just three months, when he asked her to marry him, “without a ring.”
Later, Shields continues, Neeson told Brooke he had to fly to Los Angeles to check on his house. She asked him to call her when he arrived but he said it would be “late, darlin’.” He never called.
What didn’t make the book is that Neeson actually proposed again.
“He came back after the first time he left me and asked me to marry him again,” she tells the magazine. “This was before he started to do a play [Anna Christie].
Shields goes on to say that she turned down his offer, telling Neeson that, “Knowing you, you’ll probably fall in love with your next leading lady and marry her, so I’m leaving myself out of this.”
“And I was dead right,” Shields continues.
That leading lady turned out to be Natasha Richardson, whom Neeson married in 1994.
Shields tells People she happened to run into Neeson in a bar years later and asked him to thank Richardson — who died in 2009 — for visiting her backstage when she played Sally Bowles in the Broadway show Cabaret.
“Just tell her I was really honored she came backstage,” Brooke recalls telling him. “She’s the original and she’s amazing.”
Looking back, she explains, “I was just trying to be very upfront about it and straightforward.”
There Was a Little Girl comes out on Tuesday.
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