The Family Movie That Left Melanie Griffith Needing Plastic Surgery After A Lion Clawed Her Face

Long before she was the Staten Island secretary with big hair and bigger dreams in Working Girl, Melanie Griffith spent her late teens on a movie set where the stars were lions. Her mother, Tippi Hedren, and her stepfather, Noel Marshall, were making a film with dozens of big cats who also happened to live with the family. One of those cats clawed Griffith across the face, and she needed reconstructive surgery to repair the damage.

The story is getting a fresh look this week. Comedian Marc Maron brought it up in an October 30 Instagram video, and People followed with a look back at the film, noting that Griffith was 19 during filming and is now 69. What Griffith herself said about the cat that clawed her is the strangest part of all.

How Did A Family Movie End Up With Lions In The Living Room?

The idea came to Hedren and Marshall in 1969, when they saw a pride of lions take over an abandoned house in Africa. Marshall wrote the first script in 1970, and rather than rent trained animals, the couple began raising their own. The cats lived at their Los Angeles home and later on a ranch north of the city. By 1979 the family had 71 lions and 26 tigers, along with leopards and elephants. CBS News reported in 2015 that the cast and crew ended up working with more than 100 wild animals.

Cameras finally rolled in October 1976. Marshall wrote and directed the film and played Hank, a researcher living among the big cats, while Hedren played his wife and Griffith played their daughter. “Our nine-month shoot turned into five years,” Hedren told Variety in 2016. The couple sold 600 acres of their land to keep going, as they told People in 1979. From first script to its 1981 release, the film took about 11 years and cost $17 million. It earned less than $2 million overseas and never opened in American theaters at the time.

The movie was called Roar, and its real legacy was the injury list.

Who Else Got Hurt On The Set Of ‘Roar’?

The trouble started on the very first day of filming. Noel Marshall was bitten through the hand while breaking up a fight between male lions, and his son John told CBS News that his father shook off the blood and went right back in.

John Marshall had his own close call when a lion clamped its jaws on his head. “It took six guys 25 minutes to get the lion off me,” he told CBS, and he needed 56 stitches. The cinematographer, Jan de Bont, was scalped by a lion and needed somewhere between 120 and 220 stitches depending on the account. “My skin was hanging in front of my eyes,” he later recalled. He went back to finish the job and later directed Speed and Twister.

Hedren was not spared either. A lion bit her on the back of the head, and an elephant threw her and left her with a fracture and gangrene. Even so, she never wavered on the animals. “Sure, I’m frightened, but I love them,” she told People in 1979. “It’s a great honor to be their friend.” Looking back in 2016, she told Variety, “I never thought to abandon it. I can’t believe that I didn’t.”

About 70 cast and crew members were hurt in all. The worst injury of all, though, happened to the youngest star in the family.

What Happened To Griffith And Hedren After The Lions?

Hedren and Marshall divorced in 1982, the year after Roar came out. In 1983 she founded the Roar Foundation and the Shambala Preserve in Acton, California, a sanctuary for big cats that were mistreated or abandoned. In 2020, granddaughter Dakota Johnson told The Graham Norton Show that Hedren was still living with “13 or 14” big cats.

When Drafthouse Films finally brought Roar to U.S. theaters in April 2015, it sold the movie with a line nobody could forget: “No animals were harmed in the making of Roar. But 70 members of the cast and crew were.” Hedren declined to promote the release and called parts of the marketing inaccurate. “It is far more productive for me to focus on the positive things that I am doing now,” she told CBS News at the time. Hedren turned 96 in January, and she marked the birthday with family in a rare outing.

Griffith, meanwhile, became a movie star. Working Girl in 1988 won her a Golden Globe and earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. She went on to raise four children, including Dakota Johnson. The attack on her, though, never left the finished film.

What Did Melanie Griffith Say About The Lion That Clawed Her?

According to John Marshall, his stepsister was attacked twice. The first time, a lion grabbed her by the hair. The second time a lioness clawed her face, and CBS News reported that she needed more than 100 stitches and reconstructive surgery, although other accounts put it at 50. For a time it was feared she would lose an eye, according to No Film School and other histories of the shoot. She kept her sight, and the wound did not leave her disfigured. When People profiled her in 1984, it noted that “traces of scar tissue” were still visible on her face.

What stands out most is that Griffith never blamed the cat. She had grown up around them since she was a girl. “I was 13 when Noel got his first lion. I’ve raised ten myself,” she told The Guardian in 1982. She said the lioness “didn’t mean to hurt me. Just, after seven years growing up with the lions, I forgot you have to be careful.” She also said she had felt “like a lamb invited to the slaughter” on that set. Then she summed up the whole production: “You can never be sure you’re safe and just a blow can pop your head like a ping pong ball.”