Melanie Griffith was once known as brainiac because she quite literally didn’t know much about the Holocaust. No, this isn’t a sick joke, and it certainly doesn’t do those of the fairer hair color any favors either. So how is it that anyone, anyone at all can possibly grow up so completely ignorant of such a well known and documented atrocity? Well, she did know about it, it’s just that she had no idea about the extent of it.
Younger readers would be more familiar with Melanie as the mother of Fifty Shades of Grey actress Dakota Johnson, or the wife of Antonio Banderas. But in all fairness, she is quite a distinguished and talented actress in her own right. To tell you the truth, she has won a Golden Globe for her performance in Working Girl, and was also nominated for an Academy Award.
So back to being completely ignorant on such a massive subject. As you may be aware of our other fact about this actress, she is the daughter of another actress and stepdaughter of Hollywood agent, Noel Marshall. So you could imagine she grew up in a pretty sheltered household, protected from the nastiness of the real world.
But as we said, she knew about the holocaust, just not the extent of it. It’s as if no one had really filled her in on some of the details. What details exactly? The sheer numbers of people murdered. Melanie Griffith really had no idea about the holocaust.
Now, this is something that we could understand if she was very young at the time, but she wasn’t. In fact, when she made the startling revelation about her ignorance on the subject she was in her early to mid-thirties! And to top it off, she only really became aware of the true extent of the holocaust when she decided to look into it, and World War II for herself as part of researching her role in the World War II movie.
So I guess that a few of you might be thinking this is bogus. It hardly seems plausible. Indeed, most references to this particular fact relied on a Wikipedia article on Shining Through, the movie she was working on in 1992. This particular reference was removed from the article in October 2014, presumably because one Wikipedia contributor thought that it was false or misleading. However, had they looked a little deeper they would have found the original article and quote attributed to the actress and her naivety. While we had difficulty tracing the original article that appeared in the New York Daily News in 1992, the L A Times did their own article in 1992 on Melanie Griffith, and her cumbersome remarks on the holocaust featured heavily.
I didn’t know that 6 million Jews were killed. That’s a lot of people.
…until I started researching the movie I didn’t know it was that many people. I thought it was like in the hundreds of thousands. I didn’t realize it was 6 million people. What I was trying to say was I think a lot of people don’t know it was that severe. I wasn’t born during the war. I was born in ’57 . . . but I think a lot of people don’t know.
So as you can see, Melanie Griffith did know about the Holocaust, she just didn’t know how bad it really was. What’s really worse is that she assumed that a lot of people born post WWII didn’t know about it either.
