If nothing else, Melanie Griffith is a trooper. From her early days in awful TV movies to years of typecasting based on her airy baby-girl voice, Griffith has toughed it out and proven that she can, in fact, act.

Her personal life hasn't been a breeze, either. When she was six, Alfred Hitchcock presented the girl with a wax replica of her mother (Hitchcockian actress Tippi Hedren) in a coffin. By age 14, she had stolen her mother's boyfriend, the then-22-year-old Don Johnson (Nash Bridges). They married when Griffith was 18 and divorced before she was 20. Three years later, she was nearly killed when a car hit her. The next year, a lion nearly clawed her face off during a film shoot. Talk about a trooper.

Though Griffith was an exemplary sex kitten on (and apparently off) screen, her first real breakthrough came in 1988's Working Girl. She received an Oscar nomination in the Best Actress category for her portrayal of Tess McGill, opposite Sigourney Weaver. Personally, her life was a mess, and after the film wrapped, Melanie headed to detox.

Brian De Palma gave her another break (at least, in theory) for Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990. The production turned out to be one of the most hellish in film history, no thanks to Griffin's mammaries: the actress went AWOL halfway through filming, returning with considerably larger breasts. If you can bring yourself to sit through the video, it's actually quite funny how her chest grows and shrinks.

Around the same time, Griffith re-married childhood sweetheart Johnson, but once again, their divorce proceedings outlasted their marriage.

Finally, in the mid-90s, Griffith's personal life began to click. In 1996, she married heartthrob Antonio Banderas (and so far, they're still married... with a daughter, even). Although her film career has been up and down, 1998 saw Melanie in her toughest role to date, as a junkie hooker in Larry Clark's gritty Another Day in Paradise. In 1999, Banderas directed Crazy in Alabama, in which Melanie played Lucille, a colorful, glamor-struck woman who escapes the clutches of her abusive husband and runs off to Hollywood in pursuit of stardom. This year holds plenty of the breathy queen, including Forever Lulu, Tart, and the quirky Cecil B. Demented.