Melanie Griffith: MIA

Melanie Griffith has been keeping a low profile lately — maybe too low. Even though she's the star of last weekend's box office runner-up Stuart Little 2 — she's the high-pitched voice behind Margalo the bird — the once scandal-ridden sexpot seems to have all but faded from the media spotlight.

"Somebody said, 'I think that they're showing a retrospective on your life because they think that you're dead,'" Griffith laughs, "because there were like three of my movies on [TV] in one day."

Still very much alive, the 44-year-old Working Girl found her latest role voicing Stuart's animated love interest (a gold-digging bird with a heart of gold, go figure) more challenging than she imagined. "It is so much harder than acting," she sighs. "We've been working on this for a year and a half. There've been studio heads who have said, 'No, she's not tough enough.' So, I'd go in and I'd get tougher. And then they would say, 'No, no — that's too tough.' So, then I'd go in and be sweeter — but then the lines would all change."

Ironically, Griffith is playing the very creature that terrorized her mother Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds nearly 40 years ago. Still, she explains, "I've always had an appreciation for animals. My mother has 72 lions and tigers. I could never kill any animal — except a spider."