Melanie Griffith

Born: August 9 1957
Where: New York, USA

The actress's baby-doll voice as the character of Tess McGill helped bring to the public's attention in Working Girl.

However, she had earlier been making waves with the sharp comedy Something Wild and was known to British audiences for the Newcastle-set Stormy Monday with Sting.

Avoiding typecasting as a blonde bimbo, Griffith's career - which has virtually seized up now - displayed a degree of savvy.

The daughter of actors Peter Griffith and Tippi Hedren, she chose to defy convention and undertake roles that demonstrated her versatility and capabilities.

While her mother specialized in playing cool Hitchcock blondes (Marnie), Griffith attempted (not always successfully) to transcend her party girl image.

She made her first film appearance as an extra in 1973's The Harrad Experiment, which featured her mother and soon-to-be first husband Don Johnson.

Her first role of note, though, was as a runaway heiress in Night Moves in 1975.

That same year, she displayed a light comic touch as one of the pageant contestants in the satirical Smile.

She also auditioned for the title role of Carrie in the horror film that eventually went to Sissy Spacek.

Over the next decade, she worked less frequently, taking acting classes with Stella Adler and concentrating on her marriages to Johnson and actor Steven Bauer and motherhood.

In 1978, she suffered injuries that still trouble her today when she was hit by a car while leaving a restaurant on LA's Sunset Boulevard.

Brian De Palma cast her in the pivotal role of porn actress Holly Body in his critically well received Hitchcock homage Body Double.

She went onto star as the mysteriously rebellious adventuress in and her career took off as the ambitious secretary opposite Harrison Ford in Working Girl.

Her position as a top notch comic actress was solidified, crowned by a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

However, she was seriously miscast in the woeful adaptation of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and as a cop in A Stranger Among Us.

Nobody's Fool saw her excel as Bruce Willis' unhappy wife who flirts with Paul Newman. Griffith also proved effective as a whorehouse madam in the TV series Buffalo Girls.

She was then cast as a ditsy bombshell in the wannabe screwball comedy Two Much (which served to introduce her to future husband Antonio Banderas).

Roles followed as Nick Nolte's wife in Mulholland Falls and mother of the nymphette in Adrian Lyne's 1997 remake of Lolita.

Although she unsuccessfully attempted to find a small screen comedy, she landed a comedic role as a needy actress willing to trade sexual favors for an interview in Woody Allen's Celebrity.

Next Griffith delivered what is arguably her finest screen performance to date as a heroin user in Another Day in Paradise.

She went on to stumble a bit as a dizzy aspiring actress in Banderas' directorial debut Crazy in Alabama.

In Loving Lulu, she played an unstable woman who seeks out an old sweetheart and played a movie star kidnapped by an aspiring indie filmmaker in John Waters' darkly comic Cecil B Demented.

By this time she was causing headlines thanks to a painkiller habit and her increasing use of plastic surgery.

"If they could cut off my head and put it onto another body that was, like, 20 years old, I would do that," she once said.

Recent roles have been few and far between with her voicing Margolo in Stuart Little 2.

However, upcoming projects include the thriller Shade with Sylvester Stallone and the comedy The Night We Called It A Day opposite Dennis Hopper.