Melanie Griffith says she was fined over £60,000 on 'Working Girl' for coming to work 'intoxicated'
Melanie Griffith has revealed that she was fined for coming to work on the 1988 movie Working Girl while under the influence.
In a new book about the late director Mike Nichols, Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols as remembered by 150 of his closest friends, many of those he worked with through his lengthy career recall having worked with him.
For her part, Griffith explains that the New York party scene at the time of making Working Girl, with Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, proved too hard to pull herself away from.
“There were a lot of things that happened on Working Girl that I did that were not right,” she explains in the book (via People).
“It was the late 80s. There was a lot going on party-wise in New York. There was a lot of cocaine. There was a lot of temptation.”
Producer Douglas Wick, also interviewed in the book, added that he'd received a call from a 'distressed' Nichols, who died in 2014, from the movie’s set, because Griffith was 'clearly high' and had been having drugs delivered to work.
On one occasion, Griffith says that she was so drunk, after playing pool with co-star Alec Baldwin - though Baldwin was sober at the time - that they had to shut down production for the evening.
“Mike got so mad at me, he wouldn’t talk to me. Mike Haley, the first AD, just came up and said, ‘We’re shutting down. Go home,’ and I knew I was in so much trouble,” Griffith says.
“The next morning he took me to breakfast and said, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to pay for last night out of your pocket. We’re not going to report you to the studio, but you have to pay for what it cost,’ and it was $80,000. They wanted to get my attention and they really did. It was a very humbling, embarrassing experience, but I learned a lot from it.”
$80,000 in 1988 would amount to an eye-popping $173,600 in today's money, accounting for inflation, more than £135,000.
Griffiths, the daughter of actress Tippi Hedren, went into rehab soon after making the movie, to deal with her issues with alcohol and cocaine.
She married Miami Vice star Don Johnson the following year, the same year she gave birth to daughter Dakota Johnson, now also an actor and star of the Fifty Shades of Grey movies, and recently, the acclaimed Peanut Butter Falcon.
