Melanie Griffith

The daughter of actress Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith experienced the stranger by-products of fame early in life. Named after her mother's character in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Griffith was presented with a wax replica of her mother in a miniature coffin by the black-humored director when she was six years old. Eight years later, Griffith left the comfortable confines of Hedren's exotic animal ranch to live with her mother's co-star at the time, the twenty-two-year-old Don Johnson. Four years later Griffith and Johnson were married, only to divorce a year later. Problems with drugs and drinking almost inevitably followed, culminating when Griffith, then 23, was hit by a car on Sunset Boulevard: according to the hospital medics, she would have died if she hadn't been so drunk.

Griffith, who had gotten off to a promising start with films like Night Moves (1975), began to attempt a comeback in the 1980s. She studied acting with Stella Adler and made a distinct impression in Brian DePalma's Body Double in 1984. Two years later, she received further notice for her role in Something Wild, a comedy which cast her as a free spirit opposite an uptight Jeff Daniels. In 1988, Griffith had her greatest success to date, first appearing in Robert Redford's The Milagro Beanfield War and then starring in Mike Nichols' Working Girl. For her work in the latter film, in which she portrayed a young career woman trying to conquer the New York business world, Griffith earned an Oscar nomination and no small amount of critical respect. Unfortunately, many of her subsequent films proved to be less than successful, starting with Brian DePalma's widely panned adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990.

While her acting career continued on its highs and lows, Griffith once again wed Johnson in 1989; their second union lasted until 1996. That same year, the actress married Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas following a much-publicized romance. She went on to do some of her best work in years in 1997 as the puffy, tragically misguided Mrs. Haze in Adrian Lyne's adaptation of Lolita. She then took to the road playing drug dealer James Woods' old lady in Another Day in Paradise; although the film didn't make much of a ripple at the theatre, it did feature a particularly memorable scene wherein Griffith injected heroin into her crotch. Also in 1998, the actress could be seen portraying a flippant movie star in Woody Allen's Celebrity. She next stepped in front of the camera for her husband, starring as an eccentric wanna-be actress who totes her dead husband's head around in a hat box in Crazy in Alabama in 1999. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide