Winona Ryder

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Image:Color-063.jpg Winona Ryder (born Winona Laura Horowitz on October 29, 1971) is a jewish Academy Award-nominated American actress.

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Biography

Ryder was born in Winona, Minnesota to Cindy Istas and Michael Horowitz, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania. She was named for the nearby city of Winona. Her father's family was originally named 'Tomchin', however Ryder has stated that they were wrongly assigned the name of the family that they were travelling with when they arrived at Ellis Island, in 1906. She has a younger brother Yuri (named after Yuri Gagarin), an older half-brother Jubal and an older half-sister Sunyata. Notable family friends included her godfather Timothy Leary and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

When she was seven years old she and her family resided at Rainbow, a commune near Elk, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (1.2 km²) plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or televisions, Ryder took to reading. Her mother did, however, show her some films on a screen in the barn, which perhaps led her to develop an interest in what would later make up her career. At age 10 the family moved again to Petaluma, California. She was harassed her first week of junior high school there when a group of bullies mistook her for an effeminate, scrawny boy. This led her to be schooled at home that year, but she also spent time attending the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she started taking acting lessons.

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Film career

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1985–1990

In 1985, Ryder sent a video audition to appear in the film Desert Bloom, but was rejected. However, David Seltzer, a writer and director, soon noticed her and cast her for his 1986 film Lucas for a role of a teenage outcast, falling in love, but ignored, by the main character. When asked how she wanted her name to appear in the credits, she suggested Ryder as a Mitch Ryder album of her father's played in the background.

Her next movie was Square Dance (1987) (called "a remarkable debut" by The Los Angeles Times), where her teenage character creates a bridge between two alien worlds/plot devices - a traditional farm in the middle of nowhere and a Big City. Her role concentrates on a profound question: how much of our behaviour perceived by the outside world is inherent to us and how much comes from acting the social role under pressure of the society, in a way that society considers "proper" and ethical implications coming from this classical conflict of interest, which she later had a chance to make perfect in The Age of Innocence.

Her breakthrough film is generally considered to be Tim Burton's 1988 film Beetlejuice, in which she played a goth teenager named Lydia suffering from depression induced by the extreme consumer worldview her parents represent, who comes to live in a haunted house (the haunting performed by Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton). She is the only human being among the players able to feel strong empathy and sympathy toward the ghosts and their drama of being captured in between the world of the living and the afterworld. The movie was a commercial and media success.

In 1989, she starred in a now cult movie - Heathers, which her agent thought was bad for her career. Her character is opposed to violence as a way to resolve conflicts and is able to express her views by stopping major violent accidents from happening. Again her character struggles, forced to choose between the will of mad society and her own heart - she wins that battle by choosing neither and by playing all parties against themselves, so she can be left alone to decide about her life. In the same year she did Great Balls of Fire, playing the thirteen-year-old bride of Jerry Lee Lewis.

In 1990, Winona played a primary role in another Burton project, Edward Scissorhands, alongside her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp. It is her only movie, other than 2002's Mr. Deeds, in which one can admire her natural blond hair, which she has dyed dark since childhood.

She withdrew from her role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part III, after feeling exhausted from recent roles — she finished two somewhat related movies Mermaids (film) (with Cher, Christina Ricci, Bob Hoskins and Michael Schoeffling) and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (with Jeff Daniels), both shot in 1990 and both stressing the motive of the ability of our own personal narrative changing our real life.

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1991–1995

Image:Winonamina.jpg In 1991, she played a taxi driver who wants to become a mechanic (Night on Earth), against the forced repertoire of roles selected for women by gender prejudices.

In 1992, she starred in the dual roles of Dracula's reincarnated, love interest Mina Harker and Dracula's past lover Princess Elisabeta, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a project she brought to director Francis Ford Coppola's attention.

The next year she appeared in The Age of Innocence (alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis), a film based on a novel by Edith Wharton and helmed by director Martin Scorsese, whom Ryder considers the best director. She plays a young woman, captured in plots within plots within plots of the society where every sentence pronounced has at least three different meanings. The constant merciless war of countless conspiring factions is mirrored in the scenery, full of symbols and ciphered messages passed by secret agents of love trying to tell truth while avoiding the insane rage of organised madness around them. Her role in this movie won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination.

Next she starred in How to Make an American Quilt (1995) - again the character is forced to choose between a will of the "quilting bee" and her desires, followed by Boys, (1996), again fighting for her self against the whole world, with love as her only true friend and guide. The movie also featured the motive of confusion between subjective and objective interpretations of perceived reality, later exploited in Lost Souls. She received yet another nomination in 1994 with Little Women, based on the classic novel of the same name.

In the same year she starred in a cult movie, hailed by the press as a "portrait of Generation X" - Reality Bites. Her character had to choose between the voice of reason and the voice of heart - two potential mates - a self-centered, half-educated, lacking empathy but successful man working as a producer in the business of garbage media played by Ben Stiller and a free-spirited, caring but also self-centered leader of an alternative band, permanently kicking himself out of his extremely boring jobs he has to take to earn for a living, played by Ethan Hawke. She is at the same time struggling with life in a world obsessed with money and brainwashing commercials, discarding anyone more interested in the deeds of intellect and spirit.

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1996–2000

In 1996 she starred in Al Pacino's debut as a director, Looking for Richard, and also in The Crucible with Daniel Day-Lewis (1996), a movie concerning famous mass executions of innocent people in Salem triggered by anti-witchcraft hysteria of its Puritan population. The movie was praised by critics but a commercial failure.

Soon afterward, Ryder accepted a role as a humanoid robot in the 1997 film Alien: Resurrection alongside the Alien Trilogy star Sigourney Weaver. Having grown up on the Alien franchise, she signed before having even read a script.

Celebrity (1998), her next work, contains an episode with a pun toward the character from the Night on Earth - an alternative path of life.

In 1999, she acted in and served as executive producer for Girl, Interrupted, based on the autobiography of Susanna Kaysen. Ryder was deeply attached to the film, considering it her "child of the heart"; she played the Kaysen character, who had a borderline personality disorder and was rather calm and subdued. In contrast, the supporting role performed by Angelina Jolie of a sociopath full of sexual energy and prone to dramatic episodes, stole the attention of the public and the Academy.

She went on to portray the fragile, beautiful, young, talented and doomed love interest of Richard Gere's character in the 2000 romance Autumn in New York.

In the same year she played a sister (a nun) of a secret society loosely connected to Catholic Church determined to prevent Armageddon - Lost Souls. The character struggles between the world (including the Church) laughing at the supernatural, her own beliefs based on personal experience and uncertainty between seemingly obvious empirical evidence and her doubts in her own sanity, and a questionable ability to reason or even perceive correctly. The movie was not a success, lost in a myriad of others exploiting the Millennium FUD.

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2000–2005

In 2002, Ryder appeared in two films - a romantic comedy Mr. Deeds (alongside Adam Sandler), where she plays a cynical reporter for an unscrupulous television program, and an episodic role in S1m0ne, where she portrays an extravagant star who is replaced by a computer simulated actress due to secret machinations of a director, played by Al Pacino.

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2006

Image:Scanner2.jpg In 2006, Winona will appear in two films. After a long dry spell, the actress will portray Donna Hawthorne in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, a futuristic movie based on Philip K. Dick's famous novel. The cast also includes Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr and Woody Harrelson. Live action scenes have been transformed with rotoscope software and the film will be entirely animated. She will also star in the comedy The Darwin Awards, with Joseph Fiennes.

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Shoplifting incident

On December 12, 2001, Winona Ryder was arrested for shoplifting thousands of dollars' worth of designer clothes and accessories at Saks Fifth Avenue department store in Beverly Hills, California.

Los Angeles District Attorney Stephen Cooley set up a team of eight prosecutors and seized the opportunity to prosecute the actress aggressively and filed four felony charges against her in what was described by The Guardian (UK) as a show trial since the prosecution demanded the trial be televised. Ryder hired noted defense attorney Mark Geragos and mounted her defense to fight the charges. Negotiations for a plea bargain failed at the end of summer 2002. As noted by Joel Mowbray in The National Review, the prosecution had no intention to allow the actress to plead out with misdemeanors, which was offered to more than 5,000 other defendants in similar cases between 1999 and 2001.

During the trial, she was also accused of using drugs without valid prescriptions; according to a probation report that can be found on The Smoking Gun website, she had up to 37 prescriptions filled by 20 doctors, using 6 different aliases, in a three-year period. The defense produced the official documents for the drugs that the police found in her purse, and the prosecution consequently dropped the charge. Ryder was convicted of grand theft and vandalism, but the jury acquitted her on the third felony charge (burglary). In December 2002, she was sentenced to three years' probation, 480 hours of community service, $3,700 in fines and $6,355 in restitution to Saks and the judge ordered the actress to attend psychological and drug counselling. The charges were eventually reviewed, and the felonies reduced to misdemeanors, on June 18, 2004.

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Notable romances

Her long engagements with Johnny Depp (four years), David Pirner (three years) and Matt Damon (three years) are quite famous. (During their relationship, Depp got a tattoo on his arm reading "Winona Forever," which he had altered to "Wino Forever" after their breakup.) According to various sources, most of the tabloids and gossip columns, Winona Ryder has also dated actors Daniel Day-Lewis, David Duchovny, Val Kilmer, Chris Noth, Jimmy Fallon and Christian Slater, as well as musicians Ryan Adams, Evan Dando, Adam Duritz, Dave Grohl, Page Hamilton, Beck Hansen, Jay Kay, Rhett Miller, Conor Oberst, and Pete Yorn.

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Filmography as actress

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Filmography (other)

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Awards and nominations

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External links

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