Melanie Richards Griffith is an American actress, who is best known for her various roles, such as Tess McGill in the 1988 comedy-drama film Working Girl (in which she won a Golden Globe Award) and Charlotte Haze in the 1997 drama film adaptation of Lolita. She also voiced Margalo the canary in Stuart Little 2.
For Disney, she portrayed Emily Eden in the 1992 Hollywood Pictures film A Stranger Among Us and Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. She also played Lily Reed in the 1991 Touchstone Pictures film Paradise and Betty Kerner in Two Much.
Griffith was born in Manhattan, New York City, to actress Tippi Hedren and Peter Griffith, a former child stage actor and advertising executive. Griffith's paternal ancestry is English, as well as Welsh, 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; they divorced two years later, when Griffith was four. After divorcing Hedren, her father married model/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 when Griffith was seven years old.
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.