There are a lot of celebrity dynasties in Hollywood that have seen generation after generation of performers. Families headed by celebrities like Debbie Reynolds, Kirk Douglas, and Tippi Hedren, have even seen three generations of actors and actresses.
Hedren's family has proved to be one of the most successful. Her daughter is the actress, Melanie Griffith, who married Don Johnson in 1976 and again in 1989 (it's complicated). That same year Griffith gave birth to their daughter, Dakota Johnson, who is mostly famous for starring in the Fifty Shades of Grey films.
Dakota's childhood was as interesting as you can imagine, being in a family with that much star power. Did we mention her ex-stepfather is Antonio Banderas, and her grandmother and mother raised and lived with a whole park full of lions just for a film?
Here's exactly what went on in the Griffith-Johnson household when Dakota was just a child.
She Started Going To Therapy At Age Three
While on the set of The Harrad Experiment, in 1973, Griffith met her future husband, Don Johnson. She was 14 years old and Johnson was 22, but age is just a number in showbiz, and the pair began dating despite Griffith's young age. This resulted in a six-month marriage in 1976.
Later on, in 1980, Hedren and her husband, filmmaker, Noel Marshall, enlisted the whole family to live amongst hundreds of wild animals on their compound while filming the movie Roar. Griffith was actually mauled by a lion and had to undergo facial reconstructive surgery.
Griffith married actor Steven Bauer in 1981 and they had their daughter, Alexander Griffith Bauer in 1985. But their marriage didn't last and they divorced in 1987. Shortly after, Griffith started a drug and liquor addiction because of her loneliness.
In 1988, after completing rehab, Griffith reconnected with Johnson and the two remarried in 1989. Dakota was born that year and she started her childhood off by tagging along to her parent's film sets.
Dakota joked, during her SNL opening monologue, that she thinks she was conceived on the night that her mother hosted the comedy show.
"Right after the show, my father got down on one knee and proposed to her for the second time... and exactly nine months later, I was born!" she said.
Her parent's marriage didn't survive, however. They split in 1994, reconnected a second time, split again in 1995, and finalized their divorce in 1996. Griffith then married Antonio Banderas that same year.
Dakota didn't just grow up on the sets of famous movies and television shows. She also had to go to school on these sets. Vogue reported in 2017 that Dakota could not count the number of schools she attended as a child. This resulted in her attending therapy at the very young age of three.
"The whole shebang. All the help you can get," she said. When her parents split and their divorce was made public, she needed that therapy. "I was so consistently unmoored and discombobulated. I didn’t have an anchor anywhere."
"The way I grew up is the way I grew up. I didn't know different. My parents' friends had children and we understood each other's lives. Besides, in LA, there's a wider awareness of celebrity families."
She played a constant game of back and forth, living between her mother and father's homes, but school proved to be the biggest challenge for her. If she didn't have a stable school, no friends, and parents that split, how could she concentrate on learning?
"I never learned how to learn the way you’re supposed to as a kid," she said. "I thought, Why do I have to go to school on time? What’s the point when you’re living in Budapest for six months while your stepdad films Evita and you go to school in your hotel room? I was a disaster, and I thought for so long that there was something wrong with my brain. Now I realize that it just works in a different way."
Her parents ended up sending her to an all-girls Catholic boarding school, which she thought she'd love but turned out to hate.
"I was just miserable there. It was a great school, but girls in that concentration are so horrific, just horrific."
Since school was offering nothing, she turned to showbiz instead, practicing ballet until she was sixteen, and later began her acting career, thinking like many celebrity children.
"I thought, This is just what my family does," she explained. "It’s like, my dad’s a lawyer, so I’m a lawyer. Except that it doesn’t usually work that way."
Dakota made the decision to go into showbiz herself, without the influence of her family. "I didn’t push Melanie into films, and she didn’t push Dakota. I think neither of us is the type to push," Dakota's grandmother said.
"Dakota and I never discussed the negative aspects of the business," Hedren continued. "I’m not good at advice anyway. But I have told her that I think it’s important to do different things in life, to have a sense of balance."
She Started Her Career In Modeling
During the time she was going to school in Santa Monica, Dakota started her modeling career. For the first time in her life, she had a stable address and was able to move out and into her first apartment following her high school graduation.
After applying to New York's Juilliard, and getting denied, she began auditioning. She landed a small role as Justin Timberlake's one-night stand in The Social Network.
But lack of roles started to grate on her nerves. "I was 18, and I would freak out," she told Elle. "I think there was a part of me that really didn't know if I was capable."
Soon she got a role in The Five-Year Engagement, though, and of course Fifty Shades of Grey.
Dakota might have had an impossible childhood, but she came out of it with a great attitude and has become a star just like her parents and grandmother. She the third generation of lionesses.