Melanie Griffith: The Voice That Fooled Everyone
On the set of Roar, the animal picture her stepfather Noel Marshall directed and released in 1981, Melanie Griffith was mauled by a lion and needed reconstructive surgery on her face. The injury is visible in the finished film. It is the most literal illustration available of the terms on which she grew up: a childhood spent inside other people's projects, with the damage left in the frame.
Daughter of Tippi Hedren
She was born on 9 August 1957 in Manhattan, to the actress Tippi Hedren and Peter Griffith, an advertising executive. Her parents separated when she was two and she was raised mainly in Los Angeles, moving between the coasts as a child. Her mother later married the producer Noel Marshall and ran Shambala, an animal preserve in California's Antelope Valley, which is how a teenage girl came to be sharing a house, and eventually a film set, with big cats.
She attended the Hollywood Professional School and graduated at sixteen, having skipped a grade. At fourteen, working on The Harrad Experiment, she met the actor Don Johnson, who was twenty-two. The relationship led to marriage: they wed in January 1976, when she was eighteen, and separated by July. She married the actor Steven Bauer in 1981 and divorced him in 1989, the same year she remarried Johnson, on 26 June. That marriage ended in 1996. On 14 May 1996 she married Antonio Banderas in London; they divorced in December 2015. She has three children, among them the actress Dakota Johnson.
Night Moves
Her first significant role came in 1975, at seventeen, opposite Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn's Night Moves. The casting established what directors would use her for over the next decade: a young woman whose apparent innocence is unsettling rather than reassuring, because it sits on top of an adult knowingness she makes no effort to hide.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →The instrument at the centre of it is her voice, a high, breathy, girlish sound that seems to belong to someone half her age. Placed against sexual or dangerous material, it produces a dissonance no acting school can teach and no performer can fake, and the best filmmakers of the 1980s understood the value of it immediately.
Body Double, Something Wild, Working Girl
Brian De Palma cast her in Body Double in 1984 as a pornographic actress, a role that could have ended a career and instead won her the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress, one of the more discriminating prizes in American criticism. Two years later Jonathan Demme's Something Wild made her Lulu, the erratic stranger who kidnaps a buttoned-down businessman into her life; the performance drew wide acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination.
Then, in 1988, Mike Nichols's Working Girl. Griffith played Tess McGill, a Staten Island secretary who impersonates an executive to get her own idea taken seriously, and the film turned her entire liability into the subject: the whole plot depends on nobody believing that a woman who sounds like that could have a brain. It brought a Golden Globe win and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It is the performance her career is measured against, in both directions.
After
The 1990s were unkind. She appeared in a long run of films of wildly variable quality and collected Golden Raspberry nominations in the same years as Golden Globe nominations, an unusual double that says something exact about the volatility of the material she was given and chose. She had struggled with cocaine and alcohol addiction through the 1980s. In 2000 she entered rehabilitation for painkiller addiction and, unusually for the period, documented the recovery publicly in a blog. "I am starting this recovery journal because I wanted to share with you my experiences," she wrote. She went through rehabilitation again in 2009 and has had surgery for skin cancer in 2009 and 2018.
In 2003 she made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago, a role that requires singing, dancing and eight shows a week, and impressed critics despite having no formal training of any kind. It is the most underrated line on her résumé, and the clearest evidence that the screen persona was a construction rather than an accident.
Why Melanie Is Called a Genius
The honest answer is that genius is the wrong word, and pretending otherwise would insult a real achievement. Nobody in the critical record applies it to her, and her case rests neither on intellect nor on invention but on possessing a screen quality that could not be manufactured, and on the intelligence, intermittent but genuine, of what she did with it.
The quality is a mismatch. The voice and the manner promise a child; the eyes and the delivery report an adult who has seen too much. Almost every strong film she made is built on that gap. De Palma used it for menace in Body Double, Demme for danger in Something Wild, Nichols for satire in Working Girl, where the joke is on everyone who mistakes the sound for the person. Griffith's contribution is that she never once apologised for it or tried to correct it into a more conventional register, which would have been the easy commercial move and would have destroyed her.
The counter-case is unusually strong and has to be stated. Her best decade depended heavily on three directors who knew precisely what to do with her; when the material was weak she had few resources to rescue it, and the Razzie nominations of the 1990s sit in the record beside the Golden Globe nominations. She had no formal training. Much of what she is admired for is temperament rather than technique. What she does have is the rarest commodity in film acting: a presence that reads as unfaked, from a woman who has been in front of cameras since childhood and might reasonably have lost it. Add the Broadway run at forty-five, learned from nothing, and the fair verdict is not genius but nerve, plus an instrument nobody else was issued.
Legacy
Griffith belongs to a specific and now vanished mode of American filmmaking, the adult, sexually frank, mid-budget studio picture of the 1980s, and she was one of the few performers who could hold its centre. Working Girl remains the most durable film ever made about what a woman has to pretend to be in order to be heard, and the casting of Melanie Griffith was the argument. She survived the industry, the addictions and the marriages, and lived to see her own daughter navigate a business that had spent decades underestimating her mother's voice.
