The birth of her first child, Alexander, in 1985, didn't help to save her struggling marriage, and she and Bauer separated shortly thereafter. The film was a commercial failure but quickly became a cult favorite on video and cable, with Melanie again getting critical plaudits and a Golden Globe nomination. Jonathan Demme was so impressed with her performance that he gave her the female lead in Something Wild (1986) without even auditioning her. The classes paid off, as director Brian De Palma cast her as a porno actress in his murder mystery Body Double (1984) and her sexy, funny performance won her rave reviews and the Best Supporting Actress Award by the National Society of Film Critics and a Golden Globe nomination. He helped her to overcome her drug and alcohol problems and got her to take acting classes with Stella Adler in New York. Melanie started doing television work, where she met her second husband, Steven Bauer, on the set of the TV movie She's in the Army Now (1981). Unfortunately, as her career progressed, she became increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol, a fact well-known to studio executives, who stopped considering her for feature film roles. She also married Johnson, eloping in 1976, but the union ended within six months. It immediately typecast her and led to more nymphet roles, with her beautiful nude body a permanent fixture in movies like Ha-Gan (1977) and Joyride (1977). Penn took a paternal interest in her, and she felt confident and gave a riveting performance, doing racy nude scenes. She agreed but was terrified of performing in front of the camera. She was hesitant, but Johnson encouraged her to take the role. It was actually an audition for his film Night Moves (1975), and Penn gave her the role of a runaway nymphet. One day she went to meet with director Arthur Penn for what she thought was a modeling assignment. Even though Melanie didn't like modeling, she continued to do it to pay the bills. Tippi took a very liberal approach and allowed Melanie to move in with Don at a tender age. She was only 14 years old, while he was a 22-year-old with two annulled marriages. Melanie's acting career, however, began as a model at just nine months old in a commercial and she later appeared as an extra in Smith! (1969) and The Harrad Experiment (1973), where she fell in love with her mother's co-star, Don Johnson. Melanie also grew up with tigers and lions, as Tippi and Noel were raising them for the movie Roar (1981), in which the family later starred. Meanwhile, her father married Nanita Greene and had two more children: Tracy Griffith and Clay A. She married her then-agent, Noel Marshall, in 1964 (they divorced in 1982), and Melanie grew up with three stepbrothers. Tippi caught the eye of the great director Alfred Hitchcock, who gave her starring roles in The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Her parents' marriage ended when she was four years old and Tippi brought Melanie to Los Angeles to get a new start. The cast and crew of Night Moves were shooting at the house on the day the police came to question Kaufman, and as they were taking him away, Arthur Penn turned to Gene Hackman and said, "Man, we're shooting the wrong movie".Melanie Griffith was born on Augin New York City, to then model/future actress Tippi Hedren and former child actor turned advertising executive Peter Griffith. Kaufman's subsequent actions became the basis for the 2003 film Grand Theft Parsons. The house belonging to James Woods' character Quentin was owned by Phil Kaufman, road manager for Gram Parsons at the time of Parsons's death. Night Moves's original title, Dark Tower, had to be changed so as to not confuse the film with the 1974 blockbuster hit The Towering Inferno. Dunaway had just split from one of the film's stars - Harris Yulin - after a two year relationship. The role of Ellen, played by Susan Clark, was originally offered to Faye Dunaway who turned it down to star in Chinatown. Griffith's nude scenes were filmed just before the film's release, seventeen months after the start of production. Night Moves was filmed in the fall of 1973, but for undisclosed reasons, was not released until 1975.
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