Melanie Griffith | Biography, Movies, Spouse, & Facts | Britannica (2025)

Melanie Griffith (born August 9, 1957, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American actress whose best-known characters were noted for their strength and sex appeal. Her most memorable role was in the movie Working Girl (1988), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for best actress.

Early life

Griffith is the daughter of actress Tippi Hedren—who starred in director Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964)—and Peter Griffith, a businessman. Her parents divorced when she was four years old, and she moved to Los Angeles with her mother. As a child and teenager, Griffith occasionally modeled and appeared in commercials. In 1969 she made her feature-film debut, appearing as an uncredited extra in Smith!, a western.

At age 14, while working as an extra on The Harrad Experiment (1973), Griffith met a 22-year-old actor named Don Johnson. The two began dating and eventually moved in together. When she was 16, Griffith graduated from the Hollywood Professional School. In 1976 Griffith and Johnson married, but they divorced later that year.

Griffith landed her first credited role in Arthur Penn’s movie Night Moves (1975), a film noir starring Gene Hackman. Griffith received praise for her portrayal of a runaway. For the next few years she continued to act, but the films she appeared in were neither popular nor critical successes. Her career was also negatively impacted by reports of her partying, and she struggled with addiction over the next several decades.

Body Double, Something Wild, and Working Girl

During the filming of the TV movie She’s in the Army Now (1981), Griffith met actor Steven Bauer, and the two later married (1981–89). The relationship brought stability to Griffith, and, at Bauer’s encouragement, she started taking acting lessons with Stella Adler. Griffith began to gain fame in the mid-1980s. She notably appeared in Brian de Palma’s mystery Body Double (1984), in which she played an adult-film star; Jonathan Demme’s romantic comedy Something Wild (1986), which became a cult classic; and Mike Figgis’s Stormy Monday (1988), a drama that starred Tommy Lee Jones as a Texas politician and Griffith as his mistress.

Griffith’s breakthrough came in director Mike Nichols’s romantic comedy Working Girl (1988). She starred as Tess McGill, an executive secretary who uses her charm and brains to take over her injured boss’s job. The film, which also starred Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, was a critical and commercial success. It garnered a number of Oscar nominations, and Griffith received a nod for best actress. She also won a Golden Globe Award for her performance.

Later work

Although Griffith continued to act, her subsequent movies were less successful. During the first half of the 1990s, the actress struggled with addiction as well as the demise of her second marriage to Johnson (1989–96). Her films from this period include The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), Pacific Heights (1990), A Stranger Among Us (1992), Born Yesterday (1993), and Mulholland Falls (1996).

While filming Two Much (1995), Griffith began a relationship with Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, and they wed in 1996 (divorced 2015). The marriage proved beneficial for Griffith. Her subsequent films include Crazy in Alabama (1999), a comedy directed by Banderas; Forever Lulu (2000), which costarred Patrick Swayze; and the thriller Dark Tourist (2012). In 2003 she made her Broadway debut, starring in the musical Chicago. Griffith later had a recurring role (2014–16) on the TV series Hawaii Five-0. In 2020 she had a cameo in The High Note, a music drama that starred her daughter Dakota Johnson, a noted actress.