Biography

The star of some of the great cult hits of the last 15 years, Winona Ryder has forged a place in the heart of the liberal intelligentsia, as well as somehow retaining her status as teen heroine. Deliberately steering herself away from no-brain blockbusters, she has constantly sought to challenge herself as a professional and thus, like her more provocative peer Jennifer Jason Leigh, remains consistently worth watching.

She was born Winona Laura Horowitz on October 29th, 1971, Winona being the name of her hometown in Minnesota. Her father, Michael, was an atheist, writer and editor, who worked as an archivist for psychedelic guru Dr Timothy Leary (Winona's godfather) and ran a bookstore named Flashback. Her mother, Cindy, a Buddhist, was also a writer and editor, and later produced educational videos. Deeply involved in the counter-culture, the couple were friends of Allen Ginsberg and amongst their editing works included Shaman Woman Mainline Lady, an anthology of classic writings on drug experiences, including a piece by (amazingly) Louisa May Alcott. Cindy had two children by a previous marriage - daughter Sunyata and son Jubal - then had Winona and another son, Yuri, with Michael. They would marry when Winona was 12.

At age 7, Winona moved with her family to a commune in the northern Californian town of Elk. Here they lived for several years with seven other families and numerous horses on a 300-acre plot. There was no electricity, so no TV, and Winona became a voracious reader, relating especially to The Catcher In The Rye. But her mother did show movies on a screen in the barn, exposing her curious daughter to all the classics and quickly engendering a desire to act.

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 favorite 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.

Taking a break from scholarly endeavours to star as an older woman hiding out in a prep school in Boys (a recurring dream for millions of adolescent males), Ryder returned with Al Pacino's semi-documentary Looking For Richard, both playing the role of sad Lady Anne 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 lets the movie down by failing to attain the emotional excesses demanded by the Williams role. She can be dark, but she's so obviously thoughtful, so academic, she cannot yet convince as a primal, earthy character. This is why she's so frightening in The Age Of Innocence - her darkness is subdued and suddenly revealed after years of cunning concealment.

Perhaps she knows this, deep down, as her next critical success suggested. Having been dwarfed by Sigourney Weaver in Alien: Resurrection and appeared with Kenneth Branagh and Leonardo DiCaprio in Woody Allen's Celebrity (in a role originally written for Drew Barrymore), she finally brought Girl, Interrupted to the screen. 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 and took 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.

Next came the critically panned, Golden Raspberry-nominated Autumn In New York where rich restaurateur Richard Gere falls for the young, dying Ryder (again the tragic, consumptive heroine), and now there's Lost Souls. This was actually filmed before Girl, Interrupted but delayed due to the swarm of supernatural thrillers (Stigmata, The 9th Gate, End Of Days etc) that followed the success of The Sixth Sense. In it, Ryder forms part of a Catholic group convinced Satan is about to be born of man and, as they say, she gives good fear.

Soon she's scheduled to appear in Simone, with Pacino, where a film starring a digitally created character hits big and the producers must pretend the lead is real. Then there's Just To Be Together, with Andy Garcia and Robin Wright, where the artistically-minded Ryder gets to work with famed director Antonioni. And there's Deeds, the Adam Sandler-starring remake of Frank Capra's Mr Deeds Goes To Town. The first and third of these look set to be her biggest hits to date, more than justifying the star she was awarded on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2000.

Despite her best efforts to forge a "serious" career, due to Beetlejuice and Heathers, plus her Oscar nominations, Ryder has been a tabloid favourite for a decade and more. Reports of her dating David Duchovny were relentless, as was the coverage of her relationship with Matt Damon, to whom she was introduced by Gwyneth Paltrow at a New Year's Eve party in 1997 and to whom she got engaged in 2000 (they split soon after - yet more reports blaming Penelope Cruz). Very recently, it was claimed her relationship with Beck ended due to his desire to join the Church of Scientology. Ryder herself says little about it, just continues to read and seek out enlightening and ennobling new projects. Undoubtedly, she remains her parents' daughter.

When she does speak, it's often for a very good cause. In 1993, she 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 - bright, petite and un-starry (she has always kept a place in San Francisco) - she is ever-popular with the younger public. This is why, when Friends was overtaken by Survivor in the ratings, and Jennifer Aniston was called upon to engage in a lesbian kiss, Ryder was the one the producers called in to receive the controversial smacker. Imagine the look of horror on her face. Easy, isn't it? ~ Dominic Wills

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