Marie Melendez

Born in Puerto Rico, her parents were immigrants that worked on the farm and hopped on a boat to New York. Eventually, they moved to Manhattan, NY. When Marie started elementary school and her parents became property managers for apartment buildings and that’s how they sustained making rent payments.

As a kid, Marie was always singing and dancing in front of the mirror and for family and friends.

 A talent scout came and told her parents at age 8 or 9 she should go to ballet school, and it kept her off the streets where the kids were becoming hookers.

The husband and wife of the ballet studio created an environment for her to advance.

When she was 15 years old, a Tango dance troupe from Argentina were casting new dancers for a road show. Marie auditioned and became a Tango dancer. Then, two years later, danced at Carnegie Hall in NYC.

Later on, she and her partners became a “duo act” and traveled performing. In between performance jobs (“gigs”), she worked off-broadway shows, learned backstage theater production and assisted the actors with rehearsing their lines and becoming fascinated with photography & films.

 “I don’t have a problem starting at the bottom because I know I’m not going to stay there…” – Marie Melendez

Eventually, she did temporary jobs for studios like Warner Bros. that gave her the flexibility to perform.

The growth of her career lead her to do movies with Diana Ross, “Serpico”, “Mash” as the runner, “Staying Alive”, “Lethal Weapon” for Mel Gibson, and “The God Father 2” with Paramount Studios, and “Lost Boys” with 20th Century Fox as a production coordinator and the first Latina in the company.

Her reputation excelled as a professional who could handle diverse personalities and vast workloads, onto becoming an associate producer learning through the process, birthing a desire to develop her own projects.

“After a few years of making films in the east with Martin Bregman and Sidney Lumet, she came here with Diana Ross and later joined 20th Century-Fox.“

—Harvey Bernhard Enterprises, Inc.

(Hollywood Reporter, 1983)