Melanie Griffith
Melanie Griffith In A Meltdown
July 28, 2005
MELANIE Griffith — the over-the-hill actress who plays an over-the-hill lingerie model on her new WB Network sitcom "Twins" — enraged staffers at a photo shoot to promote the show last week when she wouldn't stop smoking. When her wardrobe minions advised Griffith that her incessant puffing was ruining the pricey outfits she was posing in, the "Working Girl" star snapped, "I'm a [bleep]ing movie star, you're going to ruin my day over this!" "Twins" producers quietly took her aside afterwards and asked her to stop smoking at work. She responded by saying that "everyone knows I smoke," and claimed she'd been assured she would be allowed to light up wherever and whenever she wanted when she signed on to do the show. "You'd think she knows better by now," a snitch told The Post's Don Kaplan. "California is a no-smoking state." On "Twins," to debut this fall, Griffith plays a former underwear model rockily married to the head of a lingerie company. Their hot-blooded, teenage fraternal twin daughters have nothing in common and must deal with a wacky mother whose marriage is falling apart. A rep for Griffith did not return calls or e-mails.
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Melanie Smoked OutAugust 7, 2006
Melanie Griffith is taking heat for blowing smoke with her teenage offspring. Last week outside a Beverly Hills boutique, paparazzi snapped the actress, 48, cigarette dangling from her lips, lighting a nicotine stick for a young woman identified as her 16-year-old daughter, Dakota (dad is Don Johnson).
Given that you can't toss a spent butt these days without hitting an antismoking warning, it's not surprising that Melanie's not-so-maternal gesture has earned her a stern rebuke from the American Lung Association.
"I feel sorry for Ms. Griffith's inability to rid herself of this potentially fatal addiction but find it most reprehensible that she would facilitate her daughter's addiction," Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer of the ALA, told MSN Entertainment when we contacted the organization for comment. "I am surprised by the bland public response. How would the public react to a photo of Ms. Griffith sharing a line of coke with her daughter? Lighting her cigarette is equivalent from a moral and health impact point of view."
According to Dr. Edelman, "Cigarette smoking is the major cause of preventable death in the US, killing about 450,000 Americans each year," and adds, "Virtually all people who die due to this addiction have been hooked in their teens or pre-teens."
Griffith's publicist did not respond to our request for comment on the smoking snaps.
This isn't the first time Melanie has been called out for her tobacco jones. Back in 1996, she faced sharp criticism after she was photographed puffing away while pregnant with daughter Stella (dad is husband Antonio Banderas).
And in July 2005, the New York Post claimed wardrobe staffers at a photo shoot to plug Griffith's WB sitcom "Twins" were fuming over her ever-present cigarette, an incident that purportedly prompted producers to ask her to refrain from smoking on the set.
Just how much are cigarettes a part of Melanie's life? The actress, a rehab grad who has repeatedly tried to nix her nicotine habit, once showed In Style a picture of Banderas exhaling smoke while she breathed it in.
"Like the smoke in the picture," the actor wrote on the back of the photo, "I would like to give you my soul."
Griffith, meanwhile, raised eyebrows in 2000 when she told the New York Daily News, "I have said to my children, 'If anyone comes up to you with pot or any drugs, please tell me first. If you feel like you have to do it, I would rather you do it with me than with somebody else.'" Still, she added, "I would rather they not even try it."
Two years later, she admitted her plan didn't work with son Alexander (dad is Steven Bauer).
"I said that if my son wanted to smoke pot, I would smoke it with him. I did -- and it backfired," she was quoted as telling More magazine. "My thinking was that it would be better for him to do it at home than to go out in the street and get something that would kill him. I thought it was a good idea, but ultimately, it wasn't."
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