Melanie Griffith said that it was her daughters who convinced her to go to rehab in 2009 for an addiction to painkillers.
My daughters really sat me down and said, look, Mom, this is what it is. Dakota and Stella, both,” Griffith told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t want to say what really happened, but they were the ones who said, “You really need to get help,” and I heard them and knew what they meant. And I saw it and I did it.”
“I couldn’t have done it without them. I really couldn’t have. And I’m so grateful,” Griffith continued. “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.”
The 54-year-old actress currently appears opposite Scott Caan in the play “No Way Around but Through,” which will run at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank, Calif. through July 8.
She also joined the cast of the upcoming Lifetime pilot “This American Housewife,” which will begin filming in December in Vancouver, B.C. and also stars her husband, Antonio Banderas.
Griffith has struggled with drugs and alcohol through much of her life and went to rehab several times.
“I started on pain pills when I hurt my knee skiing and just kept taking them,” Griffith told AARP in September 2011. “The kids knew; Dakota and Stella called me on it. Antonio was in London at the time. I went away to rehab for three months; it took 10 days just to detox. We had two family weeks there, but we didn’t follow through.”
Griffith said that Banderas was “totally by her side,” but admitted that her addiction isn’t something that her husband could necessarily understand.
“Antonio was supportive to the extent that he can be, but if you’re not an alcoholic or drug addict, and you find out that your wife is a bad one, it’s hard to deal with,” Griffith continued. “As long as I’m okay, he’s okay. I wish he would go to a meeting with me or to Al-Anon, but it’s very foreign to him. Addiction runs in my family but not in his.”
Griffith and Banderas met on the set of their 1995 movie, “Two Much,” when they were both married to other people. They got married on May 14, 1996 and are parents to 16-year-old Stella Banderas. Griffith also has two children from her previous marriages to “Scarface” actor Steven Bauer and Don Johnson – Alexander Bauer, 26, and Dakota Johnson, 22.
Dakota Johnson will appear in the upcoming FOX series “Ben and Kate” opposite Nat Faxon. She also appeared in “The Social Network,” as Sean Parker’s (Justin Timberlake) one-night fling.