JOIN USIn the opinion of Winona Ryder’s father, Michael Horowitz, the teenage Winona and her boyfriend Johnny Depp were once “the hottest couple in the United States.” During the 1980s and early 1990s Ryder’s elfin face was everywhere, and her unconventional films were eagerly awaited by critics and fans. A star since the age of 17 for her performances in cult films Heathers and Beetle Juice, she had been quickly acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation — the generation, that is, that had become known as ‘X’.
Then came a series of bad creative decisions, or perhaps just bad luck, which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight. Stories about her hell-raising friends and associates culminated in the dramatic news eight years ago that the star had been arrested on charges related to a $5,000 shoplifting incident at Saks Fifth Avenue’s Beverly Hills branch. Ryder’s humiliation and her subsequent trial and conviction were eventually followed by 500 hours of community service, before the actress deliberately dropped out of sight, quitting Los Angeles to live more quietly in her childhood home of San Francisco. It was a place where she had always fitted in. “I’m San Franciscan to the bone,” she said recently.
Now, with a succession of new films opening this spring, Winona is back, riding high, and happy to subject herself once more to the critical gaze of her public. Audiences can see her this week in a humourous remake of the Star Trek story, opening on Tuesday, and then in a trio of rather more typically Ryder-esque independent and literary offerings, including an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Informers and a film called The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, written and directed by the late playwright Arthur Miller’s daughter, Rebecca.
In Star Trek, which has received rave reviews in the UK, Ryder appears alongside a youthful Spock and Captain Kirk, played by Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine, and boldly goes into camp, big-budget, cinematic territory. Aside from this space journey into mainstream entertainment, though, the actress is promising to stick to her trademark choice of unusual, risky and low-budget films.
Ryder has always been choosy about her work, but she has also missed out on a number of high-profiles roles through sheer misfortune, falling ill on the set of Godfather III to be replaced by the director’s daughter, Sofia Coppola, and reportedly losing the lead role in Shakespeare in Love to her former room-mate, Gwyneth Paltrow.
For film critic Philip French, however, Ryder’s many fine performances have stood the test of time. “She was quite exceptionally good in some of her early films and wonderfully moving in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, as well, which in many ways was the best film that Merchant Ivory never made,” he says. French sees Ryder as having been dangerously over-exposed in her early career. “She is a victim of the post-studio system in Hollywood,” he suggests.
Among Ryder’s most memorable successes, the critic lists her portrayal of Jo March in the third “and best” screen adaptation of Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women and her performance in Great Balls of Fire!, playing Jerry Lee Lewis’s under-age bride. On the down side though, Ryder did appear in the 2002 version of Mr Deeds, which French regards as “a terrible film.” (“Remakes are often bad, but this one was particularly bad.”) If Ryder’s artistic rehabilitation works out over the summer, she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent to River Phoenix, but unlike him she has survived.
“She was shaping up in the 1990s to be a successor to Natalie Wood,” suggests French. “After Wood’s early death she was reassessed as an extremely fine actress. Like Ryder, Wood, who also played vulnerable, petite brunettes, did far too much work early on in her career.”
While Ryder has kept the fresh looks of an ingenue, the mythology that cloaks her is large enough for a star twice her age. Among the unlikely Winona titbits treasured by her fans are the facts that she suffers from both insomnia and aquaphobia, that she really has blond hair, that her godfather was drugs evangelist Timothy Leary, that her brother Uri was named after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, that her father knew Allen Ginsberg and that Johnny Depp had to have his tattoo altered from ‘Winona Forever’ to ‘Wino Forever’ when they split up. Most recently, the Hollywood chatrooms have buzzed with speculation that Ryder is the mystery ‘frenemy’, or false friend, described as ‘venomous and dangerous’ by her former best buddy, Gwyneth Paltrow, in a bulletin on the star’s newsletter.
So far, so gothic. But when it comes to the issue of Ryder’s recent mental-health crisis and her criminal conviction the picture gets darker still. Speaking to Vogue last year, the actress explained that her shoplifting bout had followed a period of addiction to painkillers. “Have you ever taken painkillers?” she asked. “It isn’t a reckless state, like you’re out of your head. It’s just confusion. I wonder if that hadn’t been going on if I would have done things differently. I can’t or won’t ever know. But I remember being really confused.”
Stunned and fearful, Ryder reacted to the furore surrounding her arrest by staying away from the world and limiting her film work for many months. “I just sat there. I never said a word. I didn’t release a statement. I didn’t do anything. I just waited for it to be over,” she has said.
Ryder says she has no abiding sense of guilt about her crime because her shoplifting did not physically hurt anybody. Here, her hippy upbringing in a commune, after her family had returned from some time in Colombia living with Chilean revolutionaries, appears to have stood her in good stead. Most of her early childhood was spent immersed in the counter-culture, and her mother is said to have kept her out of school deliberately so that they could watch films together in the barn she had converted into a cinema. Now a keen collector of Hollywood ephemera, Ryder is the proud owner of the blouse Olivia de Havilland wore in Gone With the Wind, the dress Claudette Colbert wore in It Happened One Night, and the dress Leslie Caron wore in An American in Paris. She is also obsessive about music, playing the 12 guitars that hang up in her home alongside framed posters of the Clash, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen. Ryder also owns almost every edition, including translations, of her favourite book, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
In Star Trek, Abrams has cast her as the human mother of the half-Vulcan Spock, but Ryder seems to be adapting to the ageing process with better grace than some Hollywood stars. “It’s strange how birthdays are treated so funereally out here,” she has said, adding that she disapproved of Botox but might use eye cream.
Still close to her father, a dealer in rare books, she has never rejected the subversive ethos of her parents and says the phrase ‘question authority’, coined in the 1960s by her godfather, Leary, is still one of her favourites. Fittingly, her next role will see her playing a New York Times investigative reporter who exposes a people-trafficking ring based in Russia in writer/director Fiona McKenzie’s new thriller, Alpha Numeric.