Melanie Griffith Body Double

Melanie Griffith (born August 9, 1957, New York City) played Holly Body in Body Double (1984).

Griffith is Tippi Hedren's daughter, and De Palma knew what that meant

Griffith is the daughter of actress Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Hedren's working relationship with Hitchcock became one of Hollywood's most documented cases of directorial obsession and control — Hitchcock allegedly became fixated on Hedren, controlled her career, and subjected her to treatment that would now be recognized as harassment.

By casting Hedren's daughter in a film that is itself a commentary on Hitchcock's voyeurism and manipulation of women, Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) added a layer that goes beyond homage into something more unsettling. Griffith, playing a woman who is watched and used by the film industry, carries her mother's Hitchcock history whether the audience knows it or not.

Griffith was connected to De Palma through her husband's role in Scarface

The casting had a social dimension beyond the Hitchcock connection. Griffith's then-husband, Steven Bauer, had just starred as Manny Ribera in De Palma's Scarface (1983), creating a direct link between De Palma's orbit and Griffith. Bauer even has a cameo in Body Double as a male porn actor. The casting also followed a long chain of rejections: De Palma initially wanted pornographic actress Annette Haven, but Columbia Pictures rejected her. He then offered the role to Linda Hamilton, who turned it down for The Terminator. Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher, and Tatum O'Neal were all considered before Griffith was cast. (indiewire)

Body Double was the role that relaunched Griffith's career

Griffith had been acting since childhood — she appeared in Night Moves (1975) at age 17 opposite Gene Hackman — but her career had stalled by the early 1980s due to personal difficulties. Body Double put her back on the map. Her performance as Holly Body — tough, funny, unflappable — demonstrated a screen presence that Hollywood hadn't fully exploited.

The career trajectory that followed was direct:

Year	Film	Notes
1984	Body Double	Career relaunch
1986	Something Wild	Jonathan Demme; critical favorite
1988	Working Girl	Academy Award nomination, Best Actress; Golden Globe win
1990	Pacific Heights	Thriller with Michael Keaton
1992	A Stranger Among Us	Sidney Lumet

Working Girl (1988) earned Griffith an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win, but the role of Tess McGill — the resourceful outsider navigating a world that underestimates her — is a direct descendant of Holly Body. Both characters are smarter than everyone around them assumes.

Holly Body is Griffith's most underrated performance

Holly enters the film roughly halfway through and immediately changes its energy. Where Jake is passive and confused, Holly is direct and self-aware. Griffith understood this and articulated it plainly:

"I know she's a controversial figure, but she pertains to women in all areas. She's proud of what she does and she's not affected by what people think. This is a means to an end for her. She does what she does and she does it the best. She's a business woman, first of all." — Melanie Griffith, Morning Call (1984) (not available online)

In 1984 this was an unusual characterization — porn performers in mainstream films were typically depicted as either tragic or degraded. Holly is neither.

"A perfectly controlled comic performance." — Vincent Canby, The New York Times (October 26, 1984) (paywalled; quoted in Wikipedia)

De Palma was equally clear about what Griffith brought:

"She gave a sensational performance. As much as people disliked the movie, they all liked her." — Brian De Palma, The Frida Cinema (2024)

Even Kael, who found the rest of the film disappointing, singled out Griffith:

"A tickling performance by Melanie Griffith as Holly Body." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1984)

Griffith did not use a body double — and the irony was deliberate

Griffith performed all of her scenes in Body Double herself, including the sexually explicit material. De Palma made this a condition of casting: he needed an actress willing to embody Holly Body completely, not one who would hand the explicit work to a stand-in. Griffith had no body double during production. Part of her screen test included a sexually explicit scene that was later destroyed at her request, though in the finished film her face is not visible during the most explicit footage. (tcm, indiewire)

The irony runs deep. The film is called Body Double. Its plot turns on Holly Body being hired as a body double for Gloria Revelle — performing the erotic dance in Gloria's window so Jake will keep watching. Within the story, Holly is a literal body double. But Griffith, the actress playing her, is the opposite: she is entirely herself on screen, no substitution, no stand-in. In a film about the unreliability of what you're watching, Griffith's performance is the one authentic thing.

This inverts De Palma's own history. He had gotten the idea for Body Double in the first place while interviewing body doubles for Angie Dickinson's shower scene in Dressed to Kill (1980). Dickinson's nude scenes in that film were performed by Penthouse model Victoria Lynn Johnson, and the mismatch between Dickinson and Johnson became publicly conspicuous — Dickinson herself was annoyed the studio revealed the substitution, saying "Why destroy the illusion. Let them think it's Tahiti, even if it is Burbank." De Palma took the opposite lesson: the illusion itself was interesting. He built Body Double around the question of what happens when you can't trust what a body on screen is telling you. Then he cast an actress who refused to let anyone else answer that question for her. (rogerebert, wikipedia)

De Palma originally considered casting a real porn actress

De Palma initially considered pornographic actress Annette Haven for the role of Holly Body. He was open about this: "I don't know if there's any good young porno stars out here, but the older ones — Annette Haven, Seka — some of them can really act." Columbia Pictures rejected the casting, and Haven's screen test didn't convince De Palma either — he later said Haven "could not flirt." Haven did appear in a minor role in The Frankie Goes to Hollywood Sequence and consulted with De Palma about the adult film industry. Griffith prepared for the role by working with Haven to understand the world Holly inhabited. (wikipedia)

Griffith understood Holly's appeal as a character who was smarter than the film's protagonist:

"So I thought if I could do this character and make her cool and intelligent, but she's also a porno queen, that would be really great." — Melanie Griffith, The Frida Cinema (2024)