Word: winona
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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 both more direct -- from her eyes to your heart, grand old movie-style -- and more subtle than the high-voltage...
...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...
...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...