Melanie Griffith: Daughters’ Intervention Saved My Life

Melanie Griffith has revealed it was her daughters who led the intervention which saw her return to rehab in August 2009.

Speaking in a revealing interview with the Los Angeles Times, the 54-year-old talked about how Dakota, 22, and Stella, 15, confronted her over her alcohol and cocaine addiction. The Working Girl star told the paper:

“My daughters really sat me down and said, ‘Look Mom, this is what it is. You really need to get help. […] I couldn’t have done it without them. I really couldn’t have. And I’m so grateful. I see now, I just didn’t get it before. It doesn’t mean that I’m stupid. It’s just that that’s what the disease is.”

As founder of Full Circle Intervention Kristina Wandzilak explained to ABC News:

“Often times it takes for an addict to hear from the people that love them most, exactly how they’re being affected by the choices of the addiction.”

The mother of four and Academy Award nominated actress has now spent three separate stints in rehab, having wrestled with alcohol and cocaine addiction in the past. It was after her major breakthrough in the Working Girl that she first struggled and turned herself in to rehab. And in 2000, she returned for a painkiller addiction, later telling ABC’s Diane Sawyer:

“It was horrible, Diane. I never tried heroin, but they say that it’s like that. You detox and it’s like you’re out of control. Your body physically is a different entity from your soul. You don’t have any idea. You need help. You really do.”

Thankfully, Griffith’s most recent recovery has come to a happy ending: she has now been clean for close to three years, and on July 8 ends her run with the play No Way Around But Through at the Falcon Theatre in Los Angeles. She revealed to the LA Times she now felt settled and at peace:

“I’m not desperate anymore or feeling weird about myself because I’m not working in this business. I’m older and wiser and there’s a lot more to life.”