Actor / Director Profile

Melanie Griffith was born on August 9, 1957, in New York City to model Tippi Hedren and advertising executive Peter Griffith. Her parents' marriage ended in 1961 and Tippi came to Los Angeles to get a new start. Tippi caught the eye of the great director Alfred Hitchcock, who gave her starring roles in The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Tippi married her then-agent Noel Marshall in 1964, and Melanie grew up with three stepbrothers (they divorced in 1982). Meanwhile, her father married Nanita Greene Samuels, with whom he had two children: Melanie's half-siblings Tracy Griffith and Clay A. Griffith.Melanie also grew up with tigers and lions, as Tippi and Noel were raising them for the movie Roar (1981), in which the family later starred. Her career began as a model at just nine months old and she later appeared as an extra in Smith! (1969) and The Harrad Experiment (1973), where she fell in love with her mother's co-star, Don Johnson. She was only fourteen years old, while he was a twice-divorced 22-year-old. Tippi took a very liberal approach and allowed Melanie to move in with Don at a tender age. She skipped a grade and graduated from Hollywood Professional School when she was just sixteen. Even though Melanie didn't like modeling, she continued to do so to pay the bills. One day, she went to meet with director Arthur Penn for what she thought was a modeling assignment. It was actually an audition for his film Night Moves (1975), and Penn cast her as a runaway nymphet. She got attention for doing racy nude scenes at age 17, and was immediately typecast in more nymphet roles, with her beautiful nude body a permanent fixture in most of these films. She married Johnson when she was 18, but the marriage only lasted a few months.Unfortunately, as her career progressed, she became increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol, a fact well known to studio executives, who stopped considering her for film roles. Melanie then turned to television, and met her second husband, Steven Bauer, on the set of She's in the Army Now (1981) (TV). He helped her to overcome her drug and alcohol problems and got her to take acting classes with Stella Adler in New York. The classes paid off, as director Brian De Palma cast her as a porn actress in his murder mystery Body Double (1984) and her sexy, funny performance won her rave reviews and the Best Supporting Actress Award by the National Society of Film Critics. Jonathan Demme was so impressed with her performance that he cast her in Something Wild (1986) without even auditioning her. The film became a cult favorite, with Melanie again getting critical plaudits. The birth of her first child, Alexander, in 1985, didn't help to save her struggling marriage, and she and Bauer divorced in 1987. Melanie's career skyrocketed when Mike Nichols cast her in the breakthrough role of Working Girl (1988), a box-office hit for which she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress and won the Golden Globe Award as Best Actress in a Comedy. However, her ongoing substance abuse problems almost destroyed her career yet again, and Nichols pushed her into a rehabilitation clinic. En route to the clinic, she called Don Johnson for support, and they reconciled after her release from the clinic. She got pregnant in 1989 with their daughter Dakota Johnson, and they remarried that year.Now sober, Melanie concentrated on acting, but a poor choice of roles took a toil on her career. With the exception a lead role in the thriller Pacific Heights (1990) and supporting turns in Nobody's Fool (1994) and Now and Then (1995), the films Melanie chose flopped badly, especially The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). Even though she gave heartfelt performances in all her films, she was often miscast, with her breathy little-girl voice not helping matters in her starring roles as a spy in Shining Through (1992) and as a homicide detective going undercover in the Hassidic Jewish community in New York City in A Stranger Among Us (1992). Her personal life was making headlines again when she left Johnson because of his own substance-abuse problems, reconciled with him briefly when he became sober, only to leave him again, this time for Antonio Banderas, her married co-star from Two Much (1995). Both she and Banderas created a scandal in 1995 with their torrid romance, and the tabloids followed their every move, including her divorce from Johnson and his divorce from wife Ana Leza. Melanie became pregnant with her third child, and she and Banderas married in 1996. Their daughter Stella Banderas was born later that year, and the notorious couple were forgiven by the public and the media.Melanie was outstanding as a ditsy heroin addict on the run in the crime drama Another Day in Paradise (1998), and some critics hailed her performance as the best work of her career to date; however, she failed to receive any major award nominations. She then starred in Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998) with Leonardo DiCaprio, then the made-for-cable movie RKO 281 (1999) (TV), in which she played actress Marion Davies, a part that garnered her Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Greenmoon Productions, the production company that she formed with Banderas, produced several flops, such as her starring vehicle Crazy in Alabama (1999) (directed by Banderas). As a result, mainstream film offers dried up. Melanie became dependent to pain killers, and returned to rehab in 2000. She experienced a great loss in 2001, when her father died at age 67.In 2003, Melanie turned to the Broadway stage and emerged with a rave review from the New York Times theater critic and also packed houses for her turn as the murderess "Roxie" in the musical "Chicago". It renewed her confidence, as she had never sang, danced or been on the Broadway stage before. In 2005, she surprised viewers by playing a sexy mom to the title characters on the TV series "Twins" (2005). However, the series was canceled after one season. Her career took another blow when her next attempt at a TV series, "Viva Laughlin" (2007) with Hugh Jackman, was canceled after two episodes. Melanie would not appear in any film or television projects for the remainder of the decade. And in 2009, she was back in rehab for drug and alcohol addiction. She stayed for three months, and was treated for skin cancer in December that year.Melanie has had many obstacles in her life, but she has overcome them thanks to the support of her husband Antonio Banderas, her three children, and mother Tippi Hedren. Banderas and Griffith are involved in many charities, including raising funds for Tippi's Shambala preserve, a refuge for wild animals.