Word: ryders
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...Winona Ryder trusts her instincts. "I didn't do the strategic, career- building thing, where I make two big movies, then a small independent one, then another big one," she says. "I do the films I like." But there was once, early in her prodigious career, when she took on a movie role in a forgettable number called 1969 just to get out of town. She was 16, and her first hit had just opened: Beetlejuice, in which she plays a crape-draped kid obsessed with death. It was just a movie, but some of her classmates in Petaluma, California...
Well, maybe not a witch, but some species of ethereal being. A dark angel, perhaps. Though at 23 Ryder is a prime icon of the post-teen set -- more than one writer has called twentysomethings the Winona Generation -- there is a quality in her dark, Walter Keane-eyed beauty that pulls her out of her time and into the crinolined past. No modern actress has her watchfulness, her fiery reticence, her gift of girlish blush and fluster. Nobody else even tries to monitor the intelligent, expectant heart beating in a virgin's breast. The true Ryder heroine is a gentle...
These are old-fashioned virtues. Indeed, without Ryder the movies might have forgotten them. And that is why Hollywood has virtually ceded the 19th century to her. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, in The Age of Innocence and now in director Gillian Armstrong's stately, shimmering version of Little Women, Ryder must translate for a modern audience the purity and confusions of a time when a first kiss was the climax to an adventure and goodness was a goal worth fighting...
...does it all in close-up. "The camera really does love her," says Meryl Streep, with whom Ryder co-starred in last year's The House of the Spirits. "It can't seem to get enough of what she holds in her eyes." Ryder has that double charm of the true movie star: the charisma to draw emotion from the viewer, the technique to express delicate shadings of that emotion. "Winona," says Armstrong, "has huge technique for someone her age." At the same time, she adds , "like the best actors, she intuitively thinks into her characters." It's a method...
...March sisters navigate the passage from girlhood to womanhood with grace, spirit and infinite appeal in Gillian Armstrong's passionate realization of the 19th century children's classic. Winona Ryder leads an entrancing cast in a family film that interrupts our pious pratings about "family values" to say something truthful and unsentimental on the subject...