Winona Ryder biography

At 10, they moved again, to Petaluma, just north of San Francisco, where, in her first week at High School, Winona was cornered and battered by kids who thought she was a gay boy (she'd later gain some form of revenge by angrily refusing to sign an autograph for one of her attackers). After the beating, she was granted a period of home study (school can't have been easy after commune life) and, better still, she was permitted by her parents to enrol at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. Here she studied acting while, before reaching her teens, appearing onstage in small theatre productions. A pragmatic romantic and already very well-read, young Noni was deadly serious about a career in film.

Success came very quickly. At 13, she was spotted by talent scouts and put forward for a role in Desert Bloom, to star Jon Voight and Ellen Barkin. She didn't get it but was picked up by the Triad artists agency and came to the attention of director David Seltzer, who cast her alongside Corey Haim and Charlie Sheen in Lucas, the tale of a geeky boy who tries to win a girl by taking up football. When asked how she would like her name to appear in the credits, she was in a quandary. Horowitz was actually the surname of her grandmother Ethel, a Russian immigrant so, since her parents had chosen a name of their own, so would she. She took Ryder from Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, one of her father's favourite bands - perhaps best known today for having a medley of their hits regularly performed live by Bruce Springsteen.

Winona's next few roles made her. First she appeared as a thoughtful and sensitive young girl who befriends a retarded young man (Rob Lowe) in the slow but rather moving Square Dance. Then came the first big one, Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, where Ryder was excellent as Lydia Deitz, a goth bookworm who defies her yuppie parents and the demon of the title to help out the ghosts in the attic (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis). Ryder wore many of her own clothes in the movie and was certainly not cast out-of-type (being a big fan of Bjork and the Sugarcubes). Beetlejuice was a major hit and earned Ryder the undying respect of the gloom rock community.

Whereas Burton now went big budget, directing Batman, Ryder stayed small-scale. Next came 1969, where she starred alongside Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Downey Jr in the story of three teenagers who turn radical when a friend is killed in Vietnam (a tale surely close to her parents' hearts). And then came the movie that sealed her indie credibility forever. In Heathers, she played Veronica Sawyer, a pretty schoolgirl who, instead of taking up with the bitchy elite, instead gets entangled with psycho-outsider Christian Slater who's intent on murdering pretty much everyone. With its subversive plot-line, witty script and bizarre dreamscapes, Heathers was a revelation, a huge influence on later teen dramas like Election and The Virgin Suicides and, arguably, a violent and serious-minded prototype for the infinitely more whimsical Ally McBeal.

Now the movies got bigger - if not better. She played teen bride Myra Gale Lewis to Dennis Quaid's Jerry Lee in Great Balls Of Fire, and Cher's long-suffering daughter in the sweet Mermaids, along with Christina Ricci, herself soon to be an even younger goth heroine in The Addams Family (both Ryder and Ricci would boogie away in the video for Cher's Shoop Shoop Song, which promoted Mermaids). At the premiere of Great Balls Of Fire, Ryder's eyes met those of another star in the making, Johnny Depp. They met some months later and began an affair that would last three years, Depp having Winona Forever tattooed on his arm. Together they starred in Tim Burton's next project, Edward Scissorhands, where Ryder, as Kim Boggs, gradually falls in love with the cute freak of the title. Burton's ending placed her firmly in the high echelons of romantic cinema by having her dance in a snow-storm created by Edward shaving an ice-sculpture up in his lonely retreat (though still loving her, he'd left her when he realised her couldn't hold her without cutting her to ribbons). The movie also saw Ryder with blonde hair for the first time. It's actually her natural colour, changed for Lucas and never changed back. Well, brunettes are more serious, right?

Despite being keen to move away from teen roles, Ryder now missed a major opportunity. Citing exhaustion and illness brought on by overwork (though rumour had it her problems were caused by her tempestuous relationship with Depp) she pulled out of Godfather 3, her role being taken by a much-derided Sofia Coppola. Instead her next role was as a cabbie who dreams of becoming a mechanic in Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth. She also appeared as Debbie Gibson in Mojo Nixon's video for Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child (very indie, very cool - she'd later turn up in a video for John Spencer's Blues Explosion). But she kept in contact with Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and, coming across a rewrite of Dracula (now with the Creative Artists Agency, she had the right to view all scripts sent to them), she took it to him, with a view to playing the romantic and doomed reincarnation of the Count's dead love. Coppola decided to make it, and Ryder began the slow process of growing up onscreen.

Still a big reader, Ryder was attracted to literary screenplays, and now she took on Isabel Allende's House Of the Spirits, a magical realist tale of a family struggling through bloody revolution in fascist Chile. Playing alongside heavyweights like Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, the pressure was on. Added to that, her relationship with Depp was breaking down and, suffering from chronic insomnia, for five days she booked herself into a psychiatric clinic. It was only a short period, but it would help her in more ways than one.

For the next four years, Ryder would stick almost solely to such literary works. Now came Martin Scorsese's The Age Of Innocence, adapted from Edith Wharton's novel about thwarted love in 19th Century New York. Here she was excellent as the apparently good little wife of Daniel Day Lewis (with whom she had a post-Depp affair) who turns out to be a manipulative demon, and deservedly won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Next came Reality Bites, a wordy, po-faced Gen X drama notable only for starting the current trend for having screen teenagers sound like 80-year-old psychology professors. Then it was back to the classics with Alcott's Little Women (no hint of drug experiences here, unfortunately, but it did earn Ryder a second Oscar nomination), and Whitney Otto's How To Make An American Quilt. Meanwhile, Ryder's private life was back on track, having taken up with Dave Pirner, singer and guitarist with Soul Asylum, at the time riding high on their Grave Dancers' Union LP.

Her next release, Boys, would be a break from scholarly endeavours and also a major disappointment for Ryder. Having signed on to the movie when it was called The Girl You Want, she found the script radically altered but could not escape from her contract and thus wound up fuelling adolescent male wet dreams as an older woman hiding out in a prep school. This was particularly painful as she'd turned down the chance to play Harrison Ford's titular love interest in Sabrina partly on the grounds that she considered the movie disrespectful to women. Due to all the bickering, Boys had been shelved for some time and was eventually only released to 100 screens in the US.

As if seeking forgiveness from the gods of acting, she'd next appear in Al Pacino's semi-documentary Looking For Richard, both playing the role of the seduced and broken Lady Anne in Richard III and discussing the play in general. She read The Diary Of Anne Frank for an audio book. Then she reunited with Daniel Day-Lewis for The Crucible where, as arch-accuser Abigail Williams, she got to lead a gaggle of hysterics in a mass freak-out as she attempted to send ex-lover John Proctor to the scaffold. Ryder herself has said that The Crucible “will be shown in schools and considered a classic” but this is arguable. Probably because she's such a cerebral person, Ryder clearly struggled to attain the emotional excesses demanded by the Williams role. She could be dark, but she was so obviously thoughtful, so academic, she had trouble convincing as a primal, earthy character. She'd been so frightening in The Age Of Innocence because her violent emotions were there repressed, then suddenly revealed after years of cunning concealment.

Having turned down the fluffy comedy The Object Of My Affection and forced to miss out on Conspiracy Theory due to scheduling difficulties, she moved on to Alien: Resurrection, the fourth in the Alien saga and directed (surely temptingly for film buff Ryder) by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, creator of Delicatessen and The City Of Lost Children. Here, 200 years after Alien 3, she'd join a cloned Ripley and a motley gang of ruffians as they're hunted through a giant gothic spacecraft by the usual shape-shifting monsters. It really wasn't the right place for her and she would later admit with an honesty rare in Hollywood "I couldn't hold my own against Sigourney Weaver and those special effects. I still don't know what I was doing in that movie. I look at it now and realise I really didn't belong. I'm just this little girl running around." Worse still, Ryder would injure her back during filming. The painkillers she took would soon lead her into deep waters, indeed.

Next, Winona would pop up as the nice girl who might save a flighty and madly superficial Kenneth Branagh but is ignored in Woody Allen's Celebrity (a role originally written for Drew Barrymore). Then, having turned down the Christina Ricci role in Sleepy Hollow (that Tim Burton, ever loyal) and failed to win the female lead in Fight Club, she concentrated instead on a project far closer to her own heart - Girl, Interrupted. Ryder had read Susanna Kaysen's novel years before and, recognising her younger self in the troubled, alienated main protagonist (“It was my life for years”), had been trying to get it filmed since 1996. Now, as executive producer, she managed it and, thankfully, played to her strengths, taking the lead role as the confused, depressed Susanna who, after a half-hearted attempt at suicide, spends two years in a psychiatric hospital. The more visceral character, Lisa - the wild, charismatic equivalent of Jack Nicholson's McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - was played by Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for her efforts. This was good casting - Ryder as the self-analysing, introverted voyeur, Jolie as the flamboyant extrovert, tormented by mood-swings.

After a one-off stage performance in The Vagina Monologues, next would come Autumn In New York where rich restaurateur Richard Gere falls for the young, dying Ryder, again the tragic, consumptive heroine. Following the roaring success of Girl, Interrupted, this would be a savage let-down for Ryder as it was first critically panned then Golden Raspberry-nominated. Ryder would vehemently state that she was proud of her work in the film and that it had been let down by poor marketing. Meanwhile, rumours abounded of problems behind the scenes, with Gere being accused of using script approval to squeeze Ryder's part, preventing her from stealing the movie.

Following this hiccup would come Lost Souls, actually filmed before Girl, Interrupted but delayed due to the current swarm of supernatural thrillers (Stigmata, The 9th Gate, End Of Days etc). Here Ryder would play a girl once possessed by a demon and now teaching at a church school. Attending the exorcism of a serial killer, she's warned that the Antichrist is soon to take over the body of bestselling author Ben Chaplin and so tries to save him. The movie was appropriately gloomy but lacking in suspense or shocks, despite Ryder being convincingly disturbed.

2001 would see Winona find controversy in two TV guest roles, first in Strangers With Candy where Amy Sedaris played a crack whore returning to High School, then in Friends where she engaged in a lesbian kiss with Jennifer Aniston, successfully boosting the show's ratings once it had been topped by Survivor. But the gossip this stirred up was as nothing compared to the press explosion surrounding her private life. In August, 2001, she was laid low in London by acute stomach pains that forced her to drop out of the movie Lily And The Secret Planting. The next month she would visit Dr Jules Lusman, breaking down in tears in his office as she described the pain she said was being caused by the spinal condition scoliosis (stemming from that accident during Alien: Resurrection) and an elbow injury she'd sustained on the set of her upcoming movie Mr Deeds. Lusman, a doctor well-known for his dealings with celebrities and recommended by Ryder's friend Courtney Love, opened a file for her under the name Emily Thompson and prescribed Vicoprofen, an opiate-based painkiller that quells severe discomfort but can be addictive. For the next few months he'd treat her at her Beverly Hills home (at $300 an hour), giving her Valium and the painkiller Endocet, and was even invited to her 30th birthday party.

In fact, Lusman had been under investigation by California's medical regulators since 1997, the authorities believing that he'd been overprescribing such drugs. They were especially keen to clamp down on this behaviour as Vicodin, Vicoprofen and various other "legal" narcotics had become highly fashionable amongst the celebrity set, with many now attending V-parties, where pills were laid out like snacks. Indeed four million Americans were said to be using these drugs recreationally. And so high drama was on the cards when, in December, Ryder was caught shoplifting at Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard. Having paid for some $3,700 worth of stuff, she was found to have another 20 items on her, including a white Gucci dress, five purses and four hairpieces, valued at $5,560. It was said she'd taken tissue paper in to wrap up the goods, and scissors to cut off the security tags. Worse, when searched, the police found she was carrying Demerol, Endocet, Vicodin and Vicoprofen, and did not have a prescription for the Endocet. She was facing three years in jail.

At first, there were excuses, Ryder claiming to have been practising for a role in Steve Martin's Shopgirl. But, with public opinion having it that celebrities could get away with anything, the prosecutors were in no mood to let it drop. Ryder was to be made an example for all to see. On the jury was Peter Guber, chairman of Sony when they'd made Ryder's Dracula, and he would hear all manner of damaging evidence. Ryder, it was said, had received 37 prescriptions from 20 different physicians between January, 1996 and December, 1998. Jules Lusman, whose offices had been searched in December, 2001, was now himself being charged with overprescribing, but backed up Ryder's claim that he'd given her the Endocet. On the 6th of December, 2002, his licence to practise would be permanently revoked. That same day, Ryder, having been acquitted of burglary but found guilty of vandalism and grand theft, was sentenced to 480 hours of community service and three years' probation, and was ordered to pay $3,700 in fines and $6,355 in restitution. She'd also get her wrist slapped for making fun of her situation on Saturday Night Live, and her arm broken again as one particularly frenetic press scrimmage saw a deputy sheriff pushed onto her, causing her to fall awkwardly against her attorney.

It seemed her whole life was in disarray, having just split from boyfriend Pete Yorn, the latest in a string of musicians she'd dated, stretching from Dave Pirner and Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, through Ryan Adams and Beck to Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. Inbetween these, she'd enjoyed a longer-standing relationship with Matt Damon to whom she'd been introduced by her friend Gwyneth Paltrow at a New Year's Eve party in 1997 (Paltrow was then dating Damon's buddy Ben Affleck) and to whom she'd got engaged in 2000. Oddly, as they are not renowned for such decency, it would be another musician who helped Ryder through the difficult aftermath of the court case - Page Hamilton of the band Helmet. With the drugs involved, too, most of these people cannot have helped Ryder maintain a steady path to thespian brilliance.

Ryder would serve out her community sentence by working with blind children and those with AIDS. She'd also enjoy some success onscreen with the first of two movies she'd shot while the court case proceeded. This would be Mr Deeds, an Adam Sandler vehicle and a remake of Frank Capra's 1936 classic. Here Sandler would play a small-town pizzeria owner who inherits a $40 billion media empire. Now everyone's out to get him, including corporate swine Peter Gallagher and Ryder, a trashy TV producer who pretends to be a school nurse to win Sandler's heart and set him up for humiliation. Naturally, she falls for the big galoot, with his gallant Ordinary Joe ways.

A big $100 million hit, Mr Deeds would set Ryder back on track, her progress being further fuelled by a cameo in Simone, where she appeared briefly as the leading actress who goes ballistic, provoking director Al Pacino into creating a virtual film star that will do everything he says. With Hollywood quick to forgive their own, many offers would now come her way, most of which, sadly, would fall through. A chance to work with Antonioni on Just To Be Together came to naught, as did several other projects. A rather unchivalrous Vincent Gallo would also claim he'd sacked her from his movie The Brown Bunny - possibly a good thing, considering what actresses had to do in that film.

But things would, gradually, turn around, Ryder finding herself hired for several prestige projects, most of which would take some time to complete. First, though, there'd be yet more controversy when she took a cameo in Asia Argento's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, based on the stories of cult writer JT LeRoy. Here Argento herself would play a junkie prostitute who takes her 7-year-old son from the care of his beloved foster parents and introduces him to a life where he's subjected to all manner of mental and physical brutality. With Ryder appearing as a psychologist who tries to get the boy to re-enact his own rape with dolls, all the while keeping one eye on the clock, it was relentlessly disturbing, an upsetting tour de force, a purposefully unrelaxing holiday in other people's misery. And it performed well financially, in all the American cinemas in which it was shown. Unfortunately, there were only two.

The movie itself was shocking enough. That it could all be true made it worse. LeRoy claimed the material was autobiographical, that he'd been raped, prostituted and addicted before his teens. Ryder, speaking to Vanity Fair, recalled how she'd been visiting the opera just after breaking up with Johnny Depp. She had two tickets and no guest, and so offered a ticket to young LeRoy, then a surprisingly worldly-wise urchin on the street. LeRoy had wept at the beauty of the performance, Ryder at the beauty of his reaction.

But it was all bullshit. LeRoy was soon revealed to be a con by 40-year-old author Laura Albert and her family. Albert had written the stories, LeRoy had been played by an actress, none of it was true. And it was quite clear from her myth-building stories that Ryder knew all along. What the point was remains unclear. Albert was after the money, for sure. Argento was probably attracted to the darkness and the massively complex emotions involved (certainly not the money - she uses what money she has to finance such "difficult" projects). For Ryder, though, it just seemed an exercise in terminal hipness. Combined with her continual courting of rock stars, it pointed to a juvenile need to be cool, to be out-there on the cutting-edge. Or at least to be associated with those who were. It seemed the Teen Queen of Cool was finding it hard to relinquish her throne and become a serious adult artist.

A counter-argument to this was that Ryder - still bright, petite and unusually pretty - was simply doing a fine job holding on to her youth throughout her thirties. Why not play young while you can? She certainly retained a youthful and admirable sense of outrage at perceived injustice, in 2003 standing up for the West Memphis Three, jailed in Arkansas ten years earlier for an alleged Satanic child murder. This was just the latest in many efforts she'd made for good causes. In 1993, she'd involved herself in the case of Polly Klaas, a young girl from her hometown who was kidnapped and murdered. Ryder put up $200,000 for information, and supports the Polly Klaas Foundation to this day. She has spoken out regularly for Amnesty International and for the jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Her support is always effective because - keen, polite and un-starry (despite her name appearing on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2000) - she has remained popular with the younger public.

After a series of collapsed or delayed projects, Ryder would return to the Silver Screen with two major releases in 2006. First would come The Darwin Awards, a quirky indie comedy from director Finn Taylor. This would concern people who die in the most absurd and preventable fashions, Ryder playing a cynical insurance investigator attempting to create a profile of such arses and thus save her company millions. Joining her would be bungling former homicide detective Joseph Fiennes, the film flashing back as several famous names - including Juliette Lewis and Chris Penn - were ridiculously offed. Coincidentally and sadly, Penn would die just weeks before the movie was premiered.

Following this would come Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, based on Philip K. Dick's painful recollection of his bad drug experiences in California. Set in a future where the war against drugs has been comprehensively lost and everyone's high on the dangerous narcotic Substance D, the film would see Keanu Reeves as a detective spying on his friends but, taking Substance D to maintain his cover, gradually losing his mind and developing a seriously split personality. Ryder would play Donna, a young dealer Reeves loves but cannot have as she prefers drugs to human contact. Or so it seems. As Reeves' sense of reality unravels, so identities and motives become unclear, a feeling heightened by Linklater's use of interpolated rotoscoping, a process by which animation is imposed on top of live action, making the movie like a graphic novel come to life. Cutting-edge, indeed. Ryder was still there.

It's to be hoped that Winona Ryder continues to pick her movies as well as she does her clothes. An enthusiastic collector, she owns one of Leslie Caron's dresses from An American In Paris, a Sandra Dee bikini, and a Claudette Colbert outfit from It Happened One Night, and even attended the 2000 Oscars wearing one of Ava Gardner's gowns. "I've always wanted the world to be a movie," she's said "I want theme music when I walk down the street. After I started making movies I started saying 'Cut!' when I wanted a conversation to end". If she strengthens her grasp on reality and looks hard into the future, she may yet use her many travails to her advantage and justify those now-20-year-old claims that she would be the greatest actress of her generation.

Dominic Wills