Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder is an actor, born 1971.
Winona Ryder was born Winona Laura Horowitz in Winona, Minnesota in 1971, and started young. She was fifteen in Lucas, seventeen in Beetlejuice, and by Heathers in 1989 she had defined an entire adolescent register: sardonic, watchful, permanently one step ahead of the adults and about half a step behind her own trouble. Nobody has done that particular thing as well since.
Her gift is alert stillness. Ryder plays girls and women who have already noticed the thing everyone else is pretending not to see, and she can hold that knowledge on her face without a line of dialogue, which is why Tim Burton kept casting her and why she is the emotional anchor of films that are otherwise about their own design. Edward Scissorhands works because she takes the fable seriously. The Age of Innocence, which brought her a Golden Globe, works because she plays apparent innocence as strategy.
Then the nineties ran out. Little Women and The Age of Innocence brought her two Academy Award nominations, Girl, Interrupted and Alien Resurrection were the last of the big roles, and the 2000s are thin, with occasional sharp supporting work in Black Swan and A Scanner Darkly. Stranger Things changed that in 2016. Joyce Byers is a grown-up version of the same nerve she had at eighteen, a woman insisting on something nobody believes, and the series brought her a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of its ensemble. She returned to Lydia in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in 2024, thirty-six years later, playing the same character as a tired adult.
Movies (52)
- Edward Scissorhands (1990)
- Star Trek (2009)
- Homefront (2013)
- Black Swan (2010)
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
- Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
- Girl, Interrupted (1999)
- Alien Resurrection (1997)
- Beetlejuice (1988)
- Little Women (1994)
- Heathers (1989)
- The Age of Innocence (1993)
- Frankenweenie (2012)
- Mr. Deeds (2002)
- The Iceman (2012)
- The House of the Spirits (1993)
- The Informers (2008)
- S1m0ne (2002)
- The Dilemma (2011)
- A Scanner Darkly (2006)
- Sex and Death 101 (2007)
- Reality Bites (1994)
- Celebrity (1998)
- Lost Souls (2000)
- The Crucible (1996)
- Lucas (1986)
- Autumn in New York (2000)
- Mermaids (1990)
- Night on Earth (1991)
- Experimenter (2015)
TV (3)
Where to start with Winona Ryder
There is no argument about the first one, which is Heathers. A pitch-black high-school satire that studios would not make now, with Ryder narrating her own moral collapse in a diary voice, and it is still the sharpest thing she has done.
Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands are the Burton pair, and the second is the better film: she is playing the audience's decency in a story that keeps testing it. The Age of Innocence is the grown-up performance people forget, all surface and calculation, and it won her the Golden Globe.
Little Women is the Oscar-nominated lead and a genuinely warm film. Girl, Interrupted is the harder watch and the end of that phase of her career. Then Stranger Things for the comeback, where she spends a season being disbelieved by everyone and never once plays it as hysteria. A Scanner Darkly is the odd one worth finding.
The gothic ones
Burton cast her twice before she was twenty and again three decades later, and Coppola's Dracula belongs in the same register. The pale, watchful, faintly funereal thing is what she was hired for throughout.
The nineties dramatic leads
Two Academy Award nominations by twenty three, and a run of literary adaptations that would look ambitious for anyone. Little Women is the warmest and The Age of Innocence the most controlled.
The teen films
Heathers is the sharpest American teen film ever made and she is the reason it works, playing a girl who is appalled at herself in real time. Reality Bites bookends the same audience five years later.
The second act
Stranger Things brought her back at forty five as a mother nobody believes, which is a considerably better use of her than most of the nineties leads. Black Swan is two devastating scenes.