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Who Tried To Steal Antonio Banderas From Melanie Griffith?

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Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith spent eighteen years married under a spotlight that never stopped asking who might come between them.

Long before he was a global leading man, Banderas was a Spanish stage and screen actor building a résumé in his home country. By the mid-1990s, roles in Desperado and later The Mask of Zorro turned him into an international star — and into tabloid fodder for a press corps convinced someone was always trying to lure him away from his wife. The rumors followed him through some of the biggest productions of his career, with one co-star in particular becoming the centerpiece of the speculation.

• Banderas and Griffith met filming the 1995 comedy Two Much, married in May 1996, and later welcomed daughter Stella.
• Tabloids reported Griffith visited the Mexico set of 1998’s Original Sin to monitor Banderas and co-star Angelina Jolie amid rumors she was trying to “steal” him.
• Griffith filed for divorce in June 2014 citing irreconcilable differences; the divorce was finalized in December 2015, and the two remained friends afterward.

A Marriage Built on a Film Set

Banderas and Griffith’s relationship started the way plenty of Hollywood pairings do — on the job. They fell for each other while making Two Much in 1995, a romantic comedy in which Banderas’ character juggles two identities to win over two sisters played by Griffith and Danielle Harris. Life imitated the plot closely enough that the co-stars married in May 1996, and their daughter, Stella, arrived not long after. At the time, Griffith was already an established leading lady with an Oscar nomination to her name, while Banderas was still building his English-language career, meaning the tabloid attention on the marriage only grew as his profile did.

The Original Sin Firestorm

The rumor that generated the most ink centered on 2001’s Original Sin, an erotic thriller pairing Banderas with Angelina Jolie in a role loaded with explicit love scenes. Reports at the time claimed Griffith felt threatened enough by the on-screen chemistry that she flew to the film’s Mexico location to check in on the set herself, feeding a narrative that Jolie was angling to pull Banderas away from his wife. Banderas and Jolie both pushed back publicly, insisting the relationship never left the professional lane despite the material.

Jolie and Banderas maintained at the time that their connection was strictly professional — the film’s steamy scenes, they said, didn’t extend past the camera.

Madonna’s Head Start on the Rumor Mill

The “women pursuing Antonio Banderas” storyline actually predates his marriage to Griffith. Madonna made her infatuation with him a matter of public record in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare, well before he and Griffith were a couple. That early footage gave the tabloids a template they’d return to for years — treating Banderas as a man other famous women couldn’t resist, the same kind of narrative that’s followed plenty of musicians and stars whose public image rarely matches the private reality.

The Divorce That Wasn’t a Scandal

Despite two decades of speculation, Banderas and Griffith stayed married through the 2000s and into the 2010s. Griffith ultimately filed for divorce in June 2014, citing irreconcilable differences, and the split was finalized in December 2015. There was no scandal attached to the paperwork — no named third party, no messy public fight. Both stars have since described the marriage’s end in strikingly warm terms, a contrast to the bitterness that’s defined plenty of other high-profile Hollywood breakups.

Banderas has repeatedly made a point of saying Griffith remains one of his closest friends, telling interviewers in the years since that he will “love her until the day I die.” Whatever tabloid pressure the Jolie rumors and the Madonna narrative added over the years, it never produced the affair headline the press kept chasing — just a long marriage, a shared daughter, and an ex-wife Banderas still calls family.