Griffith’s career in the years after Roar developed independently of the circumstances of her childhood. Her first significant film role came in Night Moves (1975), directed by Arthur Penn and starring Gene Hackman, which she took at seventeen. Her early career was marked by the complications that accompany a very young person attempting to establish professional identity while navigating the specific pressures of the entertainment industry — she had known Don Johnson since she was fourteen, married him at eighteen, divorced him within months, and struggled with addiction in the early years of her professional life.
The breakthrough that Working Girl (1988) represented — the Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the Golden Globe win — arrived after a period of rehabilitation and recommitment to her career. The film cast her as Tess McGill, a Staten Island secretary attempting to navigate the hierarchies of the Manhattan financial world, and her performance in it was praised for its specificity and its warmth. She was thirty-one years old. The lion in the bed was seventeen years in the past.
In subsequent decades, she continued working steadily, in films including Pacific Heights (1990) alongside her mother, in a remarriage to Don Johnson that produced their daughter Dakota Johnson in 1989, and in a marriage to Antonio Banderas that lasted from 1996 to 2015. Dakota Johnson, born during her parents’ remarriage, would become an actress of her own considerable standing, and has been associated with the Shambala Preserve through her grandmother Hedren’s ongoing work there.
Griffith has served on the advisory board of the Shambala Preserve, connecting the three generations of the family to the project that began when Noel Marshall watched lions walk through a game warden’s house in Africa and thought: this could be a film.