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Serge
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Winona
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Winona Ryder
BORN: October 29, 1971
Following her breakthrough in the 1988 Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder emerged
as one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation. Adept at
playing characters ranging from depressed, angst-ridden goths to Edith
Wharton debutantes, the saucer-eyed, porcelain-skinned Ryder has
attained critical respect in addition to widespread popularity. Ryder
was born in and named after the town of Winona, Minnesota on October 29,
1971. The daughter of communal hippies and the goddaughter of LSD guru
Timothy Leary, she grew up on a commune in Northern California. Ryder's
family moved to ... continue
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Petaluma when she was ten; following regular abuse from her classmates, who
targeted her for her unconventional, androgynous appearance (she was once jumped
by a group of boys who had mistaken her for a gay boy), she was home-schooled.
At the age of eleven she joined the American Conservatory Theatre, and was soon
trying out for movie roles. An audition for the part of Jon Voight's daughter in
Desert Bloom failed to yield a role but did land the actress an agent, and at
the age of fourteen Ryder--who had changed her last name from Horowitz-- made
her film debut in Lucas (1986). Finding popularity with her turn as a suicidal
teen who has more in common with the ghosts living in her attic than with her
yuppie parents in Tim Burton's black comedy Beetlejuice, Ryder quickly became
one of the most steadily employed actresses in Hollywood. She continued to
corner the alienated and/or confused teen market with starring roles in a number
of offbeat films, including the 1989 cult classic Heathers, Great Balls of Fire
(in which she played Jerry Lee Lewis' thirteen-year-old bride) Burton's Edward
Scissorhands, and Mermaids. The early 1990s saw Ryder begin to branch out from
teen roles towards parts requiring greater maturity. Following a turn as a taxi
driver in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991), the actress starred in Francis
Ford Coppola's lavish adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula and then went on to
play Antonio Banderas' lover in the critically disemboweled The House of the
Spirits. Greater success came with Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation of Edith
Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Ryder won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar
nomination for her portrayal of Daniel Day-Lewis' picture-perfect wife, and in
the process started getting taken seriously as an actress capable of playing
more adult characters. A second Oscar nomination--this time for Best
Actress--followed the next year for Ryder's portrayal of Jo March in Gillian
Armstrong's adaptation of Little Women. The same year, the actress took on an
entirely different role in Reality Bites, in which she played a twenty-something
suffering from post-graduation angst. Similar twenty-something angst followed in
How to Make an American Quilt (1995) but was then traded for Puritanical
adultery, hair extensions, and another turn with Daniel Day-Lewis in Nicholas
Hytner's 1996 adaptation of The Crucible. Following a starring role in the
highly anticipated and almost as highly criticized Alien Resurrection in 1997,
Ryder had a turn as the waifish object of Kenneth Branagh's affections in Woody
Allen's Celebrity. She managed to escape much of the criticism leveled at both
of these films, and in 1999 and 2000, she reappeared with lead roles in two
films, Girl, Interrupted, in which she played a mental institution inmate in the
female answer to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the supernatural thriller
Lost Souls. -- Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide
