Melanie Griffith biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Actress. Born Melanie Griffith on August 9, 1957, in New York City. Her father, Peter Griffith, was a former actor turned advertising executive, and her mother, Tippi Hedren, was an actress best known for her roles in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Marnie. Griffith's parents divorced when she was 4 years old, and she moved to Los Angeles where she was raised by her mother and her mother's second husband, television producer Noel Marshall. In 1963, Griffith's mother began working with Alfred Hitchcock, and although the legendary director fell in love with her, she rejected his advances. Months later, on her sixth birthday, Melanie Griffith received a typically eerie gift from Hitchcock—a small wooden coffin containing a wax replica of her mother wearing her costume from The Birds.

Griffith began modeling and appearing in television commercials as an infant, but quickly abandoned her career as a child model due to her extreme shyness. She attended the Hollywood Professional School, where she excelled at academics, skipping a grade and graduating at the age of 16. At age 14, Griffith began dating the then-22-year-old actor Don Johnson, moving in with him later that same year. Griffith recalls explaining her decision to move in with Johnson to her parents: "I said to them, 'If I can do all of this stuff at home, if I can already drive a car, if I can get to school by myself, then why do I have to live at home?' And it made good logical sense, but it didn't make emotional sense." While living with Johnson, Griffith also began modeling again, "just to make money, though," she says, "not because I liked it."

Young Actress

In 1974 Griffith attended what she thought was a modeling audition but turned out to be an audition for a small role in Arthur Penn's 1975 film Night Moves. Griffith received the role; despite initially struggling with nerves, she soon took to life as an actress. "After I started filming, I loved it," she says. "Mostly, because I was playing a real person, not like in a commercial or something stupid like that. It was fun—like I was playing, pretending." Griffith received positive reviews, and with casting directors impressed by her beauty, mesmerizing childlike voice and haunting onscreen vulnerability, she quickly landed roles as a young seductress in another pair of 1975 films, The Drowning Pool and Smile.

In 1975, when Griffith was 18 years old, she and Johnson married.