Word: ryder
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...that, as Ryder might tell her old school taunters, is just movies. Winona is a Gen X star, so she has to be nuts, right? Aaaah, probably not. "There are so many casualties among people who grow up as actors," says Denise Di Novi, who produced Little Women (as well as Edward Scissorhands and another signature Ryder film, Heathers). "Winona is definitely not a casualty." She did struggle with a prescription drug that she took to relieve insomnia without knowing it was addictive. Says Ryder: "The doctor literally said, 'You can eat them like candy.' When I realized I needed...
...right, but she loves rock 'n' roll, hangs out at music clubs in Hollywood and even has a pop-star boyfriend -- Dave Pirner, leader of the alternative band Soul Asylum. Surely they have to be going to hell on a Harley. Yet to hear Ryder, the two are more George and Gracie than Sid and Nancy. He hangs out on the set when she's filming, she accompanies him on tour, and there are no stories of either being the typical girlfriend or boyfriend nightmare. When relaxing, they often stay home and watch movies (their latest: the British TV series...
Neither, from all evidence, is Ryder. She sounds perfectly normal, if anyone is these days. "I want everyone to like me," she says. "I don't want to disappoint anyone. I hate not getting along, or being forced into a confrontation, or throwing what looks like a tantrum. The bottom line is, I'm like everyone else...
...like anyone else, it is the 19th century heroine she has just played; between Winona Ryder and Jo March there are some spooky parallels. Both are bookworms and avid letter writers. Both grew up in a close family that lived in a house with no electricity or running water. The Marches of Concord, Massachusetts, were transcendentalists; the Horowitzes of Petaluma were part of an agreeable commune. Winona (named for the Minnesota town in which she was born) had Timothy Leary as her godfather. Her father is an archivist of counterculture magazines and books and runs a small publishing company...
There are two more Jo-Winona connections. For decades Ryder's parents have worked on a film script about Louisa May Alcott and her relationship with New York critic and short-story writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. "My dad owns the Fitz Hugh Ludlow library," she says. One of Winona's treasured volumes is a red- bound children's book of Little Women. Inside the front cover are the words: THIS BOOK BELONGS TO POLLY KLAAS. Polly, the Petaluma child who in 1993 was kidnapped and brutally murdered, became a sacred preoccupation for Ryder; she put up a $200,000 reward...