The industry that all three of them work in has changed substantially across the decades that their careers span. When Tippi Hedren began her professional life as a model and actress, the industry operated under a studio contract system that gave studios and directors enormous power over individual performers — Hitchcock’s ability to hold her under an exclusive contract while declining to cast her was a normal exercise of contractual rights, not an unusual abuse of power. The system that made that possible has been replaced, through the Screen Actors Guild and through the industry’s evolution over decades, with arrangements that give performers considerably more agency.
When Melanie Griffith was building her career through the 1980s, the industry was in a different phase — the studio system had dissolved, the independent film movement was changing the terms of commercial cinema, and the specific kind of blonde elegance that her mother had embodied for Hitchcock was no longer the dominant female archetype that it had been in the early 1960s. Griffith’s breakthrough in Working Girl was a film about a woman navigating institutional hierarchies, claiming professional credit for her own ideas, resisting the assumption that her appearance defined her possibilities. It was a film about a specifically contemporary kind of professional ambition, and Griffith’s performance in it was widely praised for the specificity and warmth she brought to the character.
Dakota Johnson’s career has unfolded in a third phase of the industry, shaped by streaming’s disruption of theatrical distribution, by the specific dynamics of franchise filmmaking, and by the cultural context of the post-#MeToo moment — a moment that includes, among its many dimensions, a different kind of scrutiny of the power dynamics that characterized the earlier phases of the industry that her grandmother and mother navigated. Her work in the Fifty Shades of Grey films, whatever their critical reception, brought her to a level of commercial visibility that launched a career that has subsequently included a range of more varied work.