Melanie Griffith

Melanie Griffith was born into the business - her mother is Tippi Hedren, the star of The Birds - and started early enough that her first substantial role, opposite Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn's Night Moves, reached cinemas in 1975 when she was seventeen. A decade of uneven work followed. Brian De Palma cast her in Body Double in 1984, which brought a Golden Globe nomination, and Jonathan Demme used her far better in Something Wild in 1986, where the character changes shape three times in ninety minutes.

Working Girl settled the matter. Mike Nichols released it in December 1988, it took $103 million worldwide, and Griffith's Tess McGill - the Staten Island secretary with the voice everyone underestimates - earned her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a musical or comedy and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She lost to Jodie Foster for The Accused. The film collected six Oscar nominations in total and converted exactly one, for Carly Simon's song.

The follow-through was poor. Pacific Heights and The Bonfire of the Vanities both arrived in 1990, the second a famous disaster. Shining Through in 1992 took the Golden Raspberry for Worst Picture and handed Griffith the Worst Actress award to match. Robert Benton's Nobody's Fool in 1994 showed what she could still do with a supporting part, but by then the offers had changed character, and the tabloids had found a more profitable subject than her filmography.

The marriages did much of that work: Don Johnson twice, briefly in 1976 and again from 1989 to 1996, then Antonio Banderas from 1996 to 2015. She played Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway in 2003 and has worked intermittently since. Then-and-now photographs of Griffith are usually published in bad faith, which obscures the simpler point - the performance in Something Wild is one of the sharpest of the decade, and nothing she has been offered since required her to repeat it.