Winona Ryder

• 1. Introduction

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  Winona Ryder once believed that a hit film would rescue her from the school playground. In 2017 she recalled her thinking when Beetlejuice topped the box office: "Ooh, it's like the number one movie. This is going to make things great at school." It did the opposite. "They called me a witch," she said.

  That gap between success on screen and trouble off it runs through the career of this American actress. She collected two Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe, and she became the face of a certain kind of wry, wounded outsider. She also faced a courtroom, a long absence from the screen, and an unlikely return.

  How does a girl raised far from Hollywood become the actress directors want for their most literary projects? Why did her own agent beg her to refuse a role that later turned into a cult favorite? And what finally brought her back to the center of popular culture after her years away?

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• 2. Bohemian Childhood

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  Winona Laura Horowitz was born in Winona County, Minnesota, on the 29th of October 1971. Her mother, Cynthia Palmer, is an author, video producer and editor. Her father, Michael D. Horowitz, was an author, editor, publisher and antiquarian bookseller who also worked as an archivist for the psychologist Timothy Leary. Leary became his daughter's godfather.

  Her names carried the tastes of her parents. She was named for the city of Winona, the closest city to the rural farmhouse where she was born. Her middle name, Laura, honored the wife of the writer Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of the family. Poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and novelist Philip K. Dick also moved in the family's circle.

  In 1978, when she was seven, the family relocated to a commune called Rainbow near Elk, California. They shared a 300 acre plot with seven other families. The remote property had no electricity and no television sets, so the young girl devoted her time to reading. She became an avid fan of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye.

  Her younger brother Urie was named in honor of the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. She also had a half-brother, Jubal, and a half-sister, Sunyata, from her mother's earlier marriage. Every year the family visited her paternal grandparents in Brooklyn for Passover. Her father later became an atheist, and her mother became a Buddhist.

  At the age of 10 she moved with her family to Petaluma, California. During her first week at Kenilworth Junior High School, other children bullied her because they mistook her for an effeminate boy. In 1983, at 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco and took her first acting lessons.

  That same year she nearly drowned, and the experience left her with aquaphobia. The fear followed her into adulthood. The underwater scenes in Alien Resurrection had to be reshot numerous times because of it.

  She says she is a natural brunette who was "really blonde as a kid." Around the age of 11 or 12 she began dyeing her hair blue and purple. By the time she auditioned for Lucas, it was black, and the filmmakers asked her to keep it. That request would nearly cost her a breakout role in Heathers.

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• 3. A Name and a Break

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  In 1985, Ryder sent in a videotaped audition for the film Desert Bloom. She recited a monologue from Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Annabeth Gish won the part, but David Seltzer remembered the teenager and cast her in his high school drama Lucas, released in 1986. The film starred Corey Haim, Charlie Sheen and Kerri Green.

  When the production asked how she wanted her name to appear in the credits, she needed a surname on the spot. An album by the singer Mitch Ryder, a favorite of her father's, happened to be playing in the background. She suggested "Ryder," and the name stuck.

  Square Dance came next, in 1987. Her teenage character forms a bridge between two different worlds, a traditional farm in the middle of nowhere and a large city. The Los Angeles Times called the performance "a remarkable debut." Both Lucas and Square Dance were only marginally successful at the box office.

  In 1988 she appeared with Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Downey Jr. in 1969, a drama about the Vietnam War and the tensions it created in American families.

  The director Tim Burton had noticed her in Lucas, and he cast her in Beetlejuice that same year. She played a goth teenager whose family moves into a haunted house full of ghosts, played by Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton. The film succeeded at the box office, and critics mostly praised both the picture and her performance. She has since said that she owes her career to Burton.

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• 4. Risky Choices

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  Ryder's agent begged her to turn down Heathers, warning that the film would "ruin her career." The satirical take on teenage life cast her and Christian Slater as high school sweethearts who begin killing off popular students. She took the part anyway, and the gamble drew largely positive reviews. The Washington Post called her "Hollywood's most impressive ingénue."

  The film still lost money at the box office, and it paid a price elsewhere. Soon after its release, an offer for her to co-star in The Freshman, a 1990 film, was rescinded because the production team was offended by its subject matter. In following decades, however, Heathers earned the status of a cult film.

  In Great Balls of Fire!, a 1989 biopic, she played the 13-year-old bride and cousin of the rock'n'roll idol Jerry Lee Lewis. The film failed at the box office and drew mixed reviews. It also led to a meeting that mattered more than the movie. She met the actor Johnny Depp at its premiere in June 1989.

  They began dating in February 1990, after a mutual friend reintroduced them. She was 18 and he was 26. They became engaged five months later and split up in June 1993.

  Ryder began the 1990s with three starring roles. In Edward Scissorhands she reunited with Burton and played the female lead opposite her then-boyfriend Depp. The fantasy film grossed $86 million and earned much critical devotion.

  Mermaids, a family comedy-drama, co-starred Cher, Bob Hoskins and Christina Ricci. The critic Roger Ebert wrote that "Winona Ryder, in another of her alienated outsider roles, generates real charisma." She received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and a National Board Review award in the same category.

  The third film, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, cast her as a troubled teenager opposite Jeff Daniels. It was deemed a commercial flop. That year the National Association of Theatre Owners named her ShoWest's Female Star of Tomorrow.

  Then came a setback she could not control. She was slated to play Mary Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III. She withdrew at the start of filming in 1990 because of nervous exhaustion.

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• 5. Period Pieces

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  In 1991, Ryder played a young taxicab driver in Jim Jarmusch's independent film Night on Earth. It had a limited release but won critical praise. She then starred in three big adaptations of literary classics, starting with Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by Coppola.

  She played two roles in Dracula: Mina Murray, and Elisabeta, a princess who was the Count's lover in the past. The script had originally been meant for television. Ryder liked it so much that she brought it to Coppola's attention herself. The film premiered in November 1992 to critical and commercial success.

  Martin Scorsese directed The Age of Innocence in 1993, adapting Edith Wharton's novel. Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis co-starred. Ryder considers Scorsese "the best director in the world." She played May Welland, the fiancée of Day-Lewis's character, Newland Archer, and won a Golden Globe. She also received Academy Award and BAFTA nominations.

  The film earned praise in October 1993 but not a large audience. Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, "Ms Ryder is wonderful as this sweet young thing who's hard as nails, as much out of ignorance as of self-interest."

  The House of the Spirits arrived the same month, with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Antonio Banderas and Glenn Close beside her. Reviews were poor. It grossed just $6 million on a budget of $40 million.

  Her next project, Broken Dreams, was to star River Phoenix opposite her. It was put on hold when he died on the 31st of October 1993.

  In 1994, Ben Stiller directed her in Reality Bites, a drama about a recent college graduate searching for direction. Stiller and her co-star Ethan Hawke have said the film got a green light only because of her star status. She earned acclaim, but the film missed its studio's box office hopes.

  She returned to period dress that year as Jo March in Little Women, from Louisa May Alcott's novel. The critic Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it the greatest adaptation of the book. Ryder received her second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress.

  The role carried a private weight. In 1993, Ryder had offered a $200,000 reward for the safe return of the kidnapped child Polly Klaas, who had lived in Petaluma, where Ryder partly grew up. After Klaas died, Ryder dedicated her performance as Jo to her memory, since Little Women was one of the girl's favorite novels.

  Ryder has also supported the American Indian College Fund since her 20s. The fund sends low-income Native Americans to universities.

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• 6. Stretching Her Range

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  How to Make an American Quilt, released in 1995, put Ryder beside Anne Bancroft, Maya Angelou and Ellen Burstyn. It grossed nearly four times its budget. Critics were mixed to positive. That same year she narrated Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl and earned a Grammy nomination. A review in Audiofile said her voice "sounds very young, matching the 14-year-old's enthusiasm and frustrations."

  Several films followed in 1996. Boys failed with audiences and critics, and Ebert called it a waste of her talent. Looking for Richard was Al Pacino's meta-documentary about a production of Shakespeare's Richard III, and it grossed only $1 million.

  The Crucible reunited her with Day-Lewis, alongside Joan Allen, in an adaptation of Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials. Given its budget, it was expected to succeed, but it failed commercially. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote that "Ryder offers a transfixing portrait of warped innocence." She later called Abigail Williams the hardest role of her career.

  In Alien Resurrection, from 1997, she played an android beside Sigourney Weaver. Her brother was a fan of the series, and that helped persuade her to say yes. The film became one of the least successful entries in the Alien series, yet it grossed $161 million worldwide. She won a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Best Actress. Ebert wrote that she was "wrong for this movie." At the 1997 ShoWest event she was named Female Star of the Year.

  On Valentine's Day 1998, she performed in Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues. She starred in Woody Allen's satire Celebrity, in a role Drew Barrymore had turned down. She and Leonardo DiCaprio narrated Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, a CD-ROM produced by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. She also sat on the 1998 Cannes Film Festival jury, led by Scorsese.

  Girl, Interrupted in 1999 was her most personal project. She starred and served as executive producer. The film adapted Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir, and Ryder called it her "child of the heart." She played Kaysen, who has borderline personality disorder and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Development had begun in late 1996.

  James Mangold directed, with Angelina Jolie co-starring. Many expected the film to mark Ryder's comeback in leading roles. Instead, Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Ebert wrote that one of Ryder's gifts is to let us know what she is thinking "without seeming to." In 1999 she also started her own music company, Roustabout Studios.

  In April 2000 she received the Peter J. Owens Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Autumn in New York, with Richard Gere, grossed $90 million worldwide. Lost Souls, in which she played a nun trying to prevent Armageddon, failed commercially, and she refused to promote it. She said of her character, "She is the ultimate believer." On the 6th of October 2000, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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• 7. Arrest and Hiatus

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  In August 2001, a severe stomach issue put Ryder in the hospital. She withdrew from the film Lily and the Secret of Planting. That year she appeared in no new releases apart from a guest role on Friends and a brief cameo in Zoolander. A four-year career hiatus had begun.

  On the 12th of December 2001, police arrested her in Beverly Hills, California. She was accused of stealing $5,500 worth of designer clothes and accessories from a Saks Fifth Avenue department store. District Attorney Stephen Cooley assembled a team of eight prosecutors and filed four felony charges.

  Ryder hired the celebrity defense attorney Mark Geragos. Plea talks in the summer of 2002 broke down because prosecutors insisted on a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Joel Mowbray of National Review noted that they also refused the store's own request to drop the charges.

  Prosecutors also accused her of using oxycodone, diazepam and Vicodin without a valid prescription. They dropped the drug possession count after it was proved that a doctor had provided the drugs as medical treatment. Jurors convicted her of grand theft and shoplifting but acquitted her of burglary.

  In December 2002, she was sentenced to three years of probation and 480 hours of community service. She also owed $3,700 in fines and $6,355 in restitution, and she was ordered to attend psychological and drug counseling. On the 18th of June 2004, Judge Elden Fox reduced the felonies to misdemeanors after reviewing her probation report. She finished her probation in December 2005.

  At the sentencing hearing, Geragos pointed to her work for the Polly Klaas Foundation and other causes. Deputy District Attorney Ann Rundle replied, "What's offensive to me is to trot out the body of a dead child." Klaas' father defended Ryder and denounced Rundle's comments.

  Ryder later explained that she was clinically depressed at the time. She said painkillers prescribed by a "quack" physician clouded her judgment. The physician, Jules Mark Lusman, later lost his medical license for unethically prescribing medication.

  The arrest made her hard to insure. Woody Allen wanted to cast her and Robert Downey Jr., who also faced legal trouble, in Melinda and Melinda. "I couldn't get insurance on them," he said. Her courtroom outfits by Marc Jacobs drew media notice, and she then appeared in his Spring 2003 advertising campaign.

  Two films shot before the arrest still reached theaters in 2002. Mr. Deeds, with Adam Sandler, grossed over $126 million in the United States alone, though the critic Philip French called it a terrible film. In Simone, she played a star replaced by a computer-simulated actress. She hosted Saturday Night Live on the 18th of May 2002, and she co-narrated the documentary The Day My God Died with Tim Robbins.

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• 8. Return and Stranger Things

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  Ryder's return began in independent film. The Darwin Awards, in 2006, paired her with Joseph Fiennes. Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly adapted a novel by Philip K. Dick, the same novelist who had been a friend of her family. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson co-starred, and rotoscope software turned the live-action footage into animation.

  In 2007 she reunited with Daniel Waters, the screenwriter of Heathers, for the black comedy Sex and Death 101. She then appeared in J. J. Abrams's Star Trek as Amanda Grayson, Spock's human mother. In Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan she played an aging ballet star.

  For the television movie When Love Is Not Enough, she played Lois Wilson, whose husband co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s. The role earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. In Frankenweenie she worked once more with Burton, who had also directed her in the music video for The Killers' single "Here with Me."

  In 2016 she began playing Joyce Byers in the Netflix series Stranger Things, created by the Duffer Brothers. Joyce is a single mother whose 12-year-old son Will vanishes mysteriously. The brothers said they wanted to lean into Ryder's "wiry unpredictability." The first season premiered in July 2016 to critical acclaim, and the cast won the SAG Award for Best Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2017.

  Season three, in 2019, reportedly paid her $350,000 per episode. The COVID-19 pandemic halted filming of season four, which resumed in September 2020. Its first volume premiered on the 27th of May 2022. Kate Bush's 1985 song "Running Up That Hill" returned to commercial success after the season used it. Ryder had often worn Kate Bush T-shirts and badges on set. The fifth and final season arrived in November and December 2025.

  The role earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Television Series Drama, her third Golden Globe nomination overall. In 2020, she starred in the HBO series The Plot Against America, based on Philip Roth's 2004 novel. Its creator, David Simon, said of her, "Now we're ready for the second act."

  She had said as early as 1992 that she would be willing to appear in a Beetlejuice sequel. In August 2015 she confirmed that she would reprise her role. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finished filming in late 2023 and was released in October 2024.

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