| Melanie Griffith - Biography |
| Melanie Griffith - Biography |
When Melanie was six, the director, Alfred Hitchcock thought it appropriate to present her with a wax replica of her mother in a miniature coffin. At fourteen, she was ready to move off her mother's exotic-animal ranch and move in with her mother's co-star at the time, twenty-two-year-old Don Johnson. She was eighteen when they married and nineteen when they divorced. Booze and drugs were on tap, and when she was hit by a car on Sunset Boulevard at twenty-three, medics said she would have been killed if she hadn't been so drunk. At twenty-four, a lioness clawed her face on a movie set.
Despite such distractions, the tall, baby-voiced nymphet made a striking first impression in Night Moves at eighteen, going on to make major waves in Body Double in 1984 and Something Wild in 1986. As Mike Nichols' Working Girl, in 1988, Griffith displayed an Oscar-caliber performance and and soon after checked herself into the Hazelden Clinic for detox. At the same time, she renewed another addiction, re-marrying the detoxified Johnson in 1989.
She survived the disastrous Bonfire of the Vanities, the film from which she disappeared halfway through production in order to have her breasts enlarged, causing continuity problems all over the place. Things between Griffith and Johnson weren't going so well, either--they fought in public, announced a separation, changed their minds, changed their minds again and got divorced, reconciled again, and separated once and for all.
Griffith married Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas in May of 1996, and the couple welcomed their first child, Stella del Carmen, the following September. Their other co-production, Two Much, was a box-office flop.