Francis Alexander Shields

Francis Alexander Shields (May 16, 1941 - April 27, 2003) was an American businessman, an executive at Revlon in New York, and best known as the father of the actress Brooke Shields.

He was born in New York City, the eldest son of Francis Xavier Shields, a top-ranking American tennis player and of the Italian Princess Donna Marina Torlonia di Civitella-Cesi. Through his mother he is related to several Italian princely families (most notably Borgia, Medici, d'Este, di Savoia). His uncle, for example, was Don Alessandro Torlonia, 5th Prince di Civitella-Cesi, the husband of the Spanish Infanta Beatriz de Borbón y Battenberg, so that he and King Juan Carlos of Spain share cousins in the Torlonia-de Borbón family.

He attended the Buckley School in Manhattan and St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, where he captained the crew that rowed in the Henley Royal Regatta in 1962. An avid sportsman, Shields never lost his love of rowing and founded the ( [http://www.power10.org/] ) Power Ten New York, an organization dedicated to the sport, in 1980.

After starting his career on Wall Street, he moved to Palm Beach, Florida in 1988, forming a real-estate company. An avid hunter and fisherman, the 6-foot-5 inch Shields spent much of his free time at the camp he owned in rural west Florida, Canoe Creek.

He married first in 1964 (and later divorced) the Californian Maria Theresia Schmon (or Schmonn), who is better known as Brooke Shields' mother/manager, Teri Shields. After their divorce, he married, in 1970, Diana "Didi" Lippert, former wife of Thomas Gore Auchincloss, who is the son of Hugh D. Auchincloss and half-brother of Gore Vidal and a stepbrother of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He had three daughters by his second marriage: Marina, Olimpia, and Christina Shields.

He died in Palm Beach, Florida of prostate cancer at the age of 61.

External links

* [http://pages.prodigy.net/ptheroff/gotha/torlonia.html Torlonia genealogy]