Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson had a famously tumultuous relationship that spanned several decades and included two marriages.
When Griffith first laid eyes on Miami Vice star Johnson, she thought he was “the most beautiful person [she’d] ever seen.”
It was 1972 and Johnson was working on the coming of age film The Harrad Experiment. It followed a fictional school where the students learned about sexuality and experimented with each other. Johnson was starring in it alongside Griffith’s mother Tippi Hedren. While the film raised eyebrows due to its sexually overt plotline, the relationship that blossomed on set dominated headlines.
Griffith was 14 at the time and working as an extra on the film when she met Johnson. “We were in the stairwell of this Anheuser-Busch Estate waiting for a setup,” Johnson recalled. “We started chitchatting.”
Hedren felt “sheer panic” at the thought of her teenage daughter falling in love with Johnson, who was 22 at the time. “How do you handle that? There was a very strong attachment between the two of them,” she said later.
They began dating a few years later, and when Griffith turned 18, they got married in 1976. However, this first marriage was short-lived, lasting only about six months before they divorced.
Despite their brief first marriage, Griffith and Johnson rekindled their romance in the late 1980s. They remarried in June 1989 after Griffith became pregnant with their daughter, Dakota Johnson, who was born in October 1989. Their second marriage was marked by both professional successes and personal struggles, including battles with addiction. Despite their efforts to make the marriage work, they divorced again in 1996.
Despite their turbulent history, Griffith and Johnson have maintained a friendly relationship, especially in co-parenting their daughter, Dakota. They have often spoken kindly of each other in interviews, reflecting on the love they shared and their enduring bond as a family.
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