Melanie Griffith was the daughter of a model mother Tippi Hedren who
was married to once-upon-a-time actor Peter Griffith. Then Tippi was
working as New York Fashion Model. The marriage ended four years later
and Tippi moved over to Los Angelos where she caught the attention of
Alfred Hitchcock as the pretty blonde cover girl in a commercial Today.
Thereby she bagged the lead roles in Marnie (1964) and The Birds (1963).
Tippi also went on to win the Golden Globe Award for her remarkable
performance in The Birds. She married Noel Marshall and Melanie grew up
with three step-brothers. The movie Roar (1981) produced and starred by
her was the starting point of her involvement with issues like animal
rights. She went on to receive the Humanitarian Award. She is also the
Founder President of The Roar Foundation fighting for animal rights. She
also won the lifetime achievement awards in France at the Beauvais Film
Festival Cinemalia 1994. She also won the same in 1995 in Spain by The
Fundacion Municipal De Cine. In 1999, "Woman of Vision" by
Women in Film and Video honored Tippi in Washington, D.C. She received
the Presidential Medal for her work in film from Hofstra University.
Though Melanie started her acting career as a model when she was just
nine months old. She also played small roles in Smith (1969) and The
Harrad Experiment (1973) and acted in the home production Roar (1981).
Melanie played the role of a runaway nymphet in Night Moves (1975) and
won several other similar roles as she got typecast. She won the Best
Supporting Actress Award by the National Society of Film Critics for her
comical and sexy role in Something Wild (1986). She grew to fame with
her title role in Working Girl (1988) and for which she received an
Oscar nomination as Best Actress and also won the Golden Globe Award as
Best Actress in a Comedy. Addiction to drugs and alcohol had always
produced a damping effect to her career. In her later stages she did a
number of movies that were not a major success. She finally married
Antonio Banderas in 1996 and has been married for a decade now.
