Melanie Griffith Had A Sizeable Age Gap With First Husband Don Johnson

Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson are just one of many Hollywood couples who fell in love despite the sizeable age gap between them. While an eight-year age gap may seem small compared to other stars, the ages they were when they first met will raise eyebrows. Griffith was only 14 years old when she met 22-year-old Johnson, who would soon become her first husband. They first met on the set of their satirical comedy "The Harrad Experiment" alongside Griffith's mother, Tippi Hedren. "We were in the stairwell of this Anheuser-Busch Estate waiting for a setup. We started chitchatting," Johnson told The Hollywood Reporter. "I thought he was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen," Griffith recalled. 

There may be many celebrity couples with bigger age gaps than you thought, but the beginning of Griffith and Johnson's relationship was alarming to say the least. They moved in together when Griffith was still underage at only 15 years old. The pair quickly got engaged as soon as Griffith came of age on her 18th birthday. While this dynamic would be widely questioned, criticized, or even investigated today, those closest to the couple celebrated their unconventional love in the '70s. Griffith's mother ended up supporting the couple after admitting she felt "sheer panic" when she first realized her daughter fell head over heels for an older, adult man. "No two people were ever more in love in the world," Hedren told People. 

In 1976, after she reached adulthood, Griffith and Johnson went to Las Vegas to get married. However, their marriage only lasted six months as they got divorced that very same year. But their love story did not end there. In fact, their turbulent relationship's many ups and downs later led them to have their famous daughter, Dakota Johnson.

Despite the uncomfortable truth about Melanie Griffith's relationship with Don Johnson, the pair somehow managed to find their way back to each other after their divorce in 1976. During their time apart, they both found other partners and had children with them. Griffith married her co-star Steven Bauer after filming the 1981 comedy film "She's in the Army Now." Griffith and Bauer got married in 1981 and had a son together in 1985, Alexander Griffith Bauer, before divorcing in 1989. Meanwhile, Johnson also dated a fellow actor during that time, Patti D'Arbanville, and they had a son together named Jesse Johnson in 1982 but never married.

Right on the heels of Griffith's divorce from Bauer, Griffith and Johnson quickly reignited their old romance. They rushed down the aisle once again, remarrying one another in June 1989 with both of their sons as ringbearers for the ceremony. "There was always this connection. I can't explain it," Griffith told People (via InStyle). "It's almost like soulmates, and it always was. I didn't want it to be like that sometimes, and sometimes I wanted not to love him. But maybe it was karma, and you have to go through all that to get to where we are now. Now it's different. It's like it was in the very beginning, but there is so much more." Just months later, in October 1989, they welcomed their only baby together, the now-famous "Fifty Shades of Grey" star Dakota Johnson. 

There are probably many reasons why Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson split and got married a second time. However, the pair finally called it quits on their age-gap marriage for good after their last divorce in 1994.