Age, Biography, and Wiki
Melanie Richards Griffith, born on August 9, 1957, in Manhattan, New York, is an American actress celebrated for her versatility and dynamic roles in film and television. She is the daughter of actress Tippi Hedren and was raised primarily in Los Angeles, where she attended the Hollywood Professional School, graduating at age 16. Griffith began her acting career as a child, making her debut in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) opposite Gene Hackman. Over the decades, she has become known for her work in both Hollywood blockbusters and independent films, earning critical acclaim for performances in movies such as Body Double (1984), Something Wild (1986), and Working Girl (1988).
| Occupation | Business |
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| Date of Birth | 9 August 1957 |
| Age | 67 Years |
| Birth Place | New York City, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Leo |
| Country | U.S |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Melanie Griffith stands at approximately 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 meters) tall. Specific details about her weight and other measurements are not publicly disclosed, as she has maintained a relatively private stance regarding her personal health and body metrics.
| Height | 5 feet 9 inches |
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Dating & Relationship Status
Her relationships have often been in the public eye, especially her high-profile marriage to Antonio Banderas, which ended in 2015. As of 2025, her current relationship status is not widely reported.
She played the voice of Margalo in Stuart Little 2 (2002), and later starred as Barbara Marx in The Night We Called It a Day (2003), and spent the majority of the 2000s appearing on such television series as Nip/Tuck, Raising Hope, and Hawaii Five-0. After acting on stage in London, in 2003, she made her Broadway debut in a revival of the musical Chicago, receiving celebratory reviews. In the 2010s, Griffith returned to film, starring opposite her then-husband Antonio Banderas in the science-fiction film Autómata (2014) and as an acting coach in James Franco's The Disaster Artist (2017).
Griffith's paternal ancestry is English, as well as Welsh, Scots-Irish, Irish, and Scottish, while her maternal ancestry is Swedish, Norwegian, and German. Her parents separated when she was two years old, after which she relocated to Los Angeles with her mother. On February 4, 1961, Griffith's father married model and actress Nanita Greene and had two more children: Tracy Griffith, who also became an actress, and Clay A. Griffith, a set designer. Her mother married agent and producer Noel Marshall on September 27, 1964.
During her childhood and adolescent years, she lived part of the time in New York with her father and part-time in Antelope Valley, California, where her mother formed the animal preserve Shambala. Griffith appeared in advertisements and briefly worked as a child model before abandoning the career, citing extreme shyness as the reason. While attending the Hollywood Professional School, Griffith was advanced in her studies, which allowed her to skip a grade level and graduate at age 16.
While on the set of The Harrad Experiment, 14-year-old Griffith met actor Don Johnson, then 22. The two began dating, and the relationship culminated in a six-month marriage from January to July 1976. After divorcing Johnson, Griffith subsequently dated Ryan O'Neal, who was 16 years her senior. In her autobiography, A Paper Life, Tatum O'Neal alleged that Griffith dragged her into an orgy with Maria Schneider and a male hairdresser during the time of her father's relationship with Griffith.
In 1977, she had a supporting part playing a hitchhiker in the Lamont Johnson-directed sports drama One on One, where John Simon in his review of One on One wrote, "Griffith is miscast in a PG picture, where she is obliged to hide her one talent (or two depending on how you count it...them)". Griffith appeared in the Israeli experimental film The Garden, in which she portrayed a naked mute woman in Jerusalem whom a man mistakes for an angel. The same year, she had a supporting role in Joyride opposite Robert Carradine, in which she played a young woman who leaves California with her boyfriend, hoping to start a fishing company in Alaska.
Griffith appeared opposite her mother, Hedren, in the film Roar (1981), directed by her then-stepfather Noel Marshall. In the film, she portrayed the daughter of animal-keepers Madeleine (Hedren) and Hank (Marshall), whose various wild animals turn on them. Roar was a project devised by Hedren and Marshall, and has retrospectively been deemed one of the most dangerous film productions of all time. Filming of Roar had begun in 1970 and was intermittent over the following decade. On one occasion during the shoot, Griffith was mauled by a lion and had to undergo facial reconstructive surgery. Her attack and injury is visible in the finished film. Also in 1981, Griffith appeared as a Women's Army Corps recruit in the made-for-television movie She's in the Army Now (1981) with Jamie Lee Curtis and Steven Bauer. Shortly after completing the film, Griffith and Bauer married.
Griffith also starred in the speculative science fiction film Cherry 2000, which followed a business executive in the year 2017, and his relationship with a sex robot. She subsequently starred opposite Sean Bean, Tommy Lee Jones, and Sting in Mike Figgis's neo-noir Stormy Monday (1988), portraying an American woman who becomes embroiled in her ex-boss's plot to acquire a jazz club in Newcastle upon Tyne. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised Griffith's performance, writing: "The stellar Miss Griffith, with her sexy, singular blend of kittenishness and strength, is entirely at home here, making an irrevocably strong impression."
On October 4, 1989, Griffith gave birth to her second child, daughter Dakota Johnson, with Don Johnson. After her pregnancy, Griffith began filming the thriller Pacific Heights (1990), directed by John Schlesinger, in which she portrayed a woman, who along with her boyfriend, becomes embroiled in a dispute with a criminal boarder in their San Francisco home. Critic Roger Ebert gave the film a middling review, and characterized it as "a horror film for yuppies". The same year, she reunited with De Palma in The Bonfire of the Vanities, a black comedy in which she portrayed a Southern belle gold-digger. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone panned the film, noting that it "achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags... Griffith has the curves and the Southern-belle voice of McCoy's mistress, Maria Ruskin, but the script robs this magnolia of her steel."
She was then cast in a lead role in Paradise (1991), a remake of the 1987 French film The Grand Highway, opposite then-husband Don Johnson, Elijah Wood, and Thora Birch. In the film, Griffith portrayed a woman reeling from the death of her child, who takes in her friend's son. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly criticized Griffith's "cuddly, melting softness" in the film as being at odds with her character: "The way that Griffith has been directed, Lily never seems less than supremely nurturing. And so the movie — unlike, say, The Doctor — pulls back from revealing the dark side of an ordinary person's anguish." In 1992, she starred as Linda Voss, a German Jewish secretary in Berlin, opposite Michael Douglas in Shining Through, a World War II-set drama based on the 1988 novel of the same name. Desson Howe of The Washington Post was critical of Griffith's portrayal of a German accent, writing: "In all fairness, Griffith shouldn't be lambasted for her incompetent accent. She should be lambasted for her acting, too. That baby voice of hers -- what's the deal with that? It's a liability in most of her movies. Here, it's completely ludicrous." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, however, noted Griffith as being "cannily cast" and "just about perfect".
In the summer of 1992, Griffith filmed the comedy Born Yesterday (1993), a remake of the 1950 film, in the role for which Judy Holliday won an Academy Award for Best Actress. Billie Dawn is a naive, uneducated showgirl whose wealthy, powerful and crude long-term fiancé (John Goodman) hires a reporter (Don Johnson) to give her enough polish to make her presentable as his wife in Washington, D.C. "This is supposed to be snappy material, and it comes across gloomy", Roger Ebert wrote at the time. He faulted the "dumbed down" screenplay, the casting and the lack of chemistry in a film that, in the end, was "morose and mean". In 1994, Griffith headlined the romantic comedy Milk Money, playing a prostitute. Janet Maslin of The New York Times deemed the film a "brainless comedy," adding: "The film may try to renounce its own tawdriness, but not Ms. Griffith; she brings a certain irrepressible gusto to her role. Among the few genuinely amusing scenes here are those that show her flouncing through the small town where Frank and Dad live, scandalizing the locals and even finding one ex-client strolling with his wife on Main Street." The same year, she had a supporting role in Nobody's Fool, a drama starring Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy, and Bruce Willis. In the film, Griffith portrays the wife of a contractor (Willis) who has disputes with a free-spirited older man (Newman) in an upstate New York town. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times noted both Willis and Griffith as "somewhat less reliable" than Newman and Tandy.
Griffith and husband Johnson separated in March 1994, reconciled later that year, but separated again in May 1995, eventually divorcing in 1996. In the midst of her separation, she appeared in an ensemble cast in the coming-of-age drama Now and Then, playing an actress who returns to her Indiana hometown to reunite with her childhood friends. Roger Ebert wrote of the film: "The adult actresses are completely superfluous to the movie, which is a contrived Stand by Me kind of story." The same year, she starred opposite Anjelica Huston and Reba McEntire in the Western miniseries Buffalo Girls, based on the 1990 novel of the same name. Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote of the series that "Huston, Griffith, and McEntire make it not just bigger than life but, at times, better." For her performance, she was nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Television film.
In 1996, Griffith co-starred with Antonio Banderas in the comedy Two Much. She and Banderas began a relationship during the film's production, and were married that year. After their respective divorces were finalized, Griffith and Banderas married on May 14, 1996, at Marylebone Town Hall in London. Following Two Much, Griffith starred in the neo-noir Mulholland Falls (1996), playing the wife of a Los Angeles police detective (played by Nick Nolte), a performance that won her the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress. Critics such as Roger Ebert praised the film as "the kind of movie where every note is put in lovingly. It's a 1950s crime movie, but with a modern, ironic edge," but the film was a box office flop.
On February 5, 1999, Griffith made her stage debut at the Old Vic in London, England, where she acted with Cate Blanchett in The Vagina Monologues. The same year, she starred in Crazy in Alabama, a film directed by Banderas and produced by Green Moon Productions, the company that Banderas and she formed together. In the film, Griffith played an eccentric woman in 1960s Alabama who kills her husband and heads to Hollywood to become a movie star; this plot is set against a subplot involving a race-related murder. Rita Kempley of The Washington Post wrote that "Griffith manages to make Barbra Streisand look downright camera-shy," but criticized its dual plots, writing that the "juxtapositions are not merely preposterous, but downright tasteless. Worse yet, they unintentionally trivialize the civil rights movement by aligning it with a ding-dong belle's tenuous connection with the women's movement." This sentiment was echoed by Paul Clinton of CNN, who wrote: "The deadly serious Alabama plot line of Crazy in Alabama is much more interesting than Griffith's wacky, comic cross-country trip. These dueling stories result in a film that's oddly uneven and unlikely to generate big box-office numbers." This was followed by a role in the HBO television film RKO 281, in which Griffith portrayed 1920s and 1930s movie star Marion Davies. For her performance, she received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie.
She returned to the stage in 2012 in a play written by Scott Caan, titled No Way Around but Through, in which she played his mother. She played Caan's mother again during 2014–16 in a recurring role on his television show Hawaii Five-0. In 2016, she filmed with Caan's father James Caan and Jon Voight in a TV movie titled J.L. Ranch.
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| Husband | Don Johnson (m. 1976-1976) (m. 1989-1996) Steven Bauer (m. 1981-1989) Antonio Banderas (m. 1996-2015) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Melanie Griffith maintains a relatively low-profile presence on major social media platforms as of 2025. She does not have widely recognized official accounts on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Her fan base often follows her through fan pages and entertainment news coverage.
Career, Business, and Investments
- Business Ventures: While acting is her primary source of income, she has explored other opportunities, though specific investments are not publicly detailed.
Griffith's well-known drug and alcohol addictions temporarily stalled her career in the early 1980s, but she made a comeback at age 26 with her role as a pornographic film actor in the Brian De Palma thriller Body Double (1984). The film, although a commercial failure, earned her the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. She then appeared in a supporting role in Abel Ferrara's thriller Fear City (1985), playing a stripper and prostitute in Times Square being stalked by a serial killer. Griffith gave birth to her first child, Alexander Griffith Bauer, on August 22, 1985, with Bauer. The following year, she had her first starring role opposite Jeff Daniels in Jonathan Demme's comedy Something Wild (1986), playing a mysterious woman who becomes involved with a straightlaced banker on a chance meeting. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of her acting: "Griffith's performance is based not so much on eroticism as on recklessness: She is able to convince us (and Daniels) that she is capable of doing almost anything, especially if she thinks it might frighten him." Griffith's performance earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy or Musical.
Education
Griffith graduated from the Hollywood Professional School at the age of 16, which allowed her to pursue her acting career early. Her formal education was completed in Los Angeles, where she was raised by her mother, Tippi Hedren.
Melanie Richards Griffith (born August 9, 1957) is an American actress. Born in Manhattan to actress Tippi Hedren, she was raised mainly in Los Angeles, where she graduated from the Hollywood Professional School at age 16. In 1975, 17-year-old Griffith appeared opposite Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn's neo-noir film Night Moves. She later rose to prominence as an actor in films such as Brian De Palma's Body Double (1984), which earned her a National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. Griffith's subsequent performance in the comedy Something Wild (1986) attracted critical acclaim before she was cast in 1988's Working Girl, which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won her a Golden Globe.
