More than just a century separates May Welland, the exquisite turn-of-the-century miniature played by Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence, and the pale, tiny waif standing on a Soho street corner with her boyfriend, David Pirner, lead singer for the grunge band Soul Asylum. Ryder, wearing an old plaid lumberjacket, jeans and black high-top sneakers, leans across Pirner’s guitar case to kiss the scraggly-haired musician goodbye. One wonders what the novelist Edith Wharton, with her keen eye for society’s sense and sensibility, would have thought. And yet, in late-twentieth-century New York City, these two young stars inhabit a purely American kind of high society: the pop-cultural elite. Just the week before, Pirner and Ryder had met the Clintons, when Soul Asylum were invited to perform at the White House.
As Ryder leans across the table in a downtown restaurant, earnestly engaged in conversation, her face bears little resemblance to that of the wide-eyed, porcelain-skinned May. With her tomboy clothes and cropped hair, she seems more like a little kid than one of the most successful actresses of her generation. She looks tired and androgynous – perfect for a Calvin Klein ad. But after a few minutes, her contemporary garb fades, and it’s easy to picture her permanently arrayed in period clothes. Ryder is pure retro – a thoughtful, literate, old-fashioned young woman who has miraculously survived success in Hollywood with her own innocence intact.
Maybe it’s all the JD Salinger she reads, as ritually as any bible. How many actresses would write a satire called In Search of Ian Hamilton and send it to Salinger’s unauthorised, would-be biographer? “I wrote the meanest things I could come up with, so he could see what that invasion of privacy would feel like,” she says, with a mischievous glint.
The room darkens as a thunderstorm rages outside. “I love the rain. It reminds me of home so much,” she says in her soft, girlish voice. “It makes me so happy, ’cause I just remember, like, being little and it would put me to sleep…” She trails off dreamily. Her eyes are enormous in her small face, and despite her current cub-scout aesthetic, she looks like the little match girl or the illustrated poster for . She’s like one of Salinger’s characters come to life; a preternaturally wise child.
“Winona is sort of like from her own planet,” says producer Denise Di Novi, who’s known her since she was 16. “She’s not totally of this world, or of this time. But she radiates intelligence, and her instincts about people and situations are incredible.”
“I love Winona’s spirit and childlike quality,” adds director Jim Jarmusch. “I remember when we were making Night on Earth, I encouraged all the actors to take me aside if they had anything they wanted to discuss. At one point we were having a real technical problem, and I was getting pretty frustrated. And Winona came over, with a real serious face, and said, ‘Jim, I need to talk to you alone.’ So I said, Winona, the acting is going great, what is it?’ And she said, ‘I need a chocolate doughnut and a glass of milk.’ She’s an interesting combination. She’s very well read, and knows a lot about books and music. But she also finds totally goofy things equally amusing.”
I first met Ryder four years ago, on the set of , starring Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis and Ryder as his child bride. At the time she was just 17 – young enough to require a professional chaperone on the set. There was a poignancy about her candour and lack of self-consciousness then. Now, at 22, Ryder seems only slightly more worldly; surprisingly, her openness has not been replaced by cynicism. Somehow she has managed to escape the Hollywood time machine that chews up young artists and spits out jaded pros.
Winona Ryder was named after the town where she was born in Minnesota (the family later moved to California). Like several other actors of her generation, Uma Thurman, Robert Downey Jr and the late River Phoenix, Ryder had a decidedly unconventional upbringing as the child of hippie intellectuals (her godfather is Timothy Leary, for whom her father worked as an archivist in the ’60s). She has an older sister, Sunyata, an older brother Jubal, and a younger brother Uri, to whom she is particularly close. “Her parents have the best marriage I have ever seen,” says Di Novi. “And they give their kids unconditional love. In some ways it’s a closer, more traditional family than, say, Dan Quayle’s idea of a nuclear family.”
When she was 10, her parents moved to a 300-acre commune along with seven other families. By the time they moved back to Petaluma, Winona was marked a misfit. Her inimitable fashion sense didn’t help: she liked to dress gamine-style, in thrift-shop clothes with her hair cropped short like a boy’s. On her third day at her new junior high school, she was called names and beaten up.
“We were poor,” she says now. “My brothers and sister and I were teased because we didn’t have money. We never had any lunch. Our parents were hippies and writers and we drove these cars that, you know, had moss growing on the ceiling.”
At 11, Ryder went through a punk phase, at one point even jumping on the stage at a Pretenders concert and charming Chrissie Hynde, who serenaded her with 2,000 Miles. At 13, she started studying acting at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She did a monologue that she developed from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and got an audition for the film . Although she didn’t get the part, she did get signed by an agent. Soon afterwards she won her first role, in . She made the movie during her summer vacation.
Ryder proceeded to make a series of risky choices, most of which paid off. She became the princess of dark fairy tales: a baby Morticia in Tim Burton’s wacky ; the queen of high-school in the cynical teen movie ; the cheerleader girlfriend of the tragic tin man (played by her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp); a fanatically religious schoolgirl who finally learns the facts of life in ; a spunky cab driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth – and the ultimate Gothic bride in Francis Ford Coppola’s a script she herself brought to the director’s attention. A critics’ darling from the age of 13, Ryder has nevertheless paid a price for her success, physically as well as psychologically. She is haunted by the peers she never meets, having all but completely missed out on the later stages of childhood. And just two years ago, her own agent told her she would never work again.
Ryder still gets upset when she talks about what happened when she flew to Rome for what was then the most important opportunity in her career, the role of Mary Corleone in Coppola’s long-awaited The Godfather: Part III. Exhausted by a gruelling year of nearly nonstop work, and having arrived straight from the set of with an upper respiratory infection and a temperature of 104, Ryder abandoned the film amid a flurry of tabloid headlines; it was so late in the game that the director replaced her with his own daughter, Sofia, who happened to be on the set. The press speculated that Ryder had succumbed to drugs or maybe even had a full scale nervous breakdown.
Coming on the heels of the endless gossip about her on-again, off-again relationship with Johnny Depp, the debacle made it seem for the first time that Ryder was just another Hollywood starlet, a member of the live-fast, burn-out-young brat pack. But her “breakdown” and subsequent recovery are an indication of just how far from the madding crowd the young actress really is. Other actors go into rehab; Ryder went home. Back with her family in Petaluma, she finally had a chance to act like exactly what she was – a dangerously worn-out young girl. “I remember the only thing that got me through the flight from Rome to San Francisco was thinking of my mum’s soup and that when I got off the plane I’m gonna get to be in my own bed.”
Like the shell-shocked Sergeant X who barely manages to survive the war with his faculties intact in Salinger’s famous short story, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, Ryder’s equilibrium was badly shattered, and she needed several months to recover. She had felt pressurised into taking the role in Coppola’s film by her agent, and her parents were warned that her career would be over if she didn’t return to Rome and complete the film. Not only did Ryder not make the movie; she later called Coppola up and complained about remarks he had made to the press about the unreliability of certain young actors.
The rumours of Ryder’s professional demise were premature: by 1992 she was bankable enough to survive another difficult encounter with Coppola – this time on the movie . As Gary Oldman’s fragile love interest, she was the victim not only of a lascivious vampire, but of the nasty rumours swirling around the set; tales of the lack of chemistry between her and Oldman, an affair she was supposedly having with another actor, and Coppola’s sometimes cruel methods for goading Ryder into the performance he wanted. “At the time, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m a real actress.’ But in retrospect I probably wouldn’t take that again unless it was a director that I knew really well and that I really trusted,” says Ryder firmly. “I learnt a lot on that set about what I’m not capable of tolerating.”
Suddenly Ryder segues into something completely different. “It’s really weird for me to talk about this stuff now, because I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington last week. It had this deep effect on me and it made me think of all the hard times I’d been through and all the times I’d thought I wasn’t going to make it and been really dramatic, and it put everything into perspective. So when I talk about these things, I keep flashing on that. Although I never knew them, I lost over a hundred relatives in the camps. You look at those faces and you wonder.”
Recently, Ryder’s been on a kind of children’s crusade. “I’ve felt a strong connection with children this past year,” she says. “The other day I saw this movie, , and it suddenly hit me – children shouldn’t be reviewed by critics. That was the whole problem when I started. I was being reviewed, but the great thing about children is that you can’t really judge them because they are still in the process of becoming. So now I get really angry when I hear people making fun of those young actors who turn to drugs or crime. I don’t think it’s a joke. I think that sometimes the industry can be a form of child abuse.”
Last month, when a young girl was abducted in her hometown of Petaluma, she offered a $200,000 reward. She’s been actively involved in trying to help locate lost children ever since David Pirner did an MTV video that flashes a series of photographs of missing teenagers. (Thanks to the video dozens of children have been put in touch with their parents.)
Off screen Ryder may still be engaged in the “process of becoming”, but on screen she’s the consummate professional. Even when she’s playing a virtual cartoon character, as in , she still exudes a kind of old-fashioned star quality, like a young Natalie Wood or Elizabeth Taylor. And she’s no pushover; she fights her own battles, and other people’s as well, intervening if she sees someone with less power in a production getting rough treatment. “Winona’s very hip about the movie business. It would be hard to run a move past her. She pulls people up on stuff,” says Jay Cocks, who co-wrote and produced The Age of Innocence. “She’s sort of like a more benign version of the kid she played in . She’s got an unorthodox kind of beauty, talent and intelligence. And she’s got a very fine-tuned phoniness detector. I took her to the New York Film Festival and as each famous person came down the aisle, Winona just did a perfect little verbal cameo, like she was drawing a caricature with words instead of ink.”
As May Welland in The Age of Innocence, Ryder spins a delicate web as a strait-laced society girl who appears to be a total innocent, but is perhaps the most manipulative character in Wharton’s finely-wrought tragedy of manners. Her fiancé, Newland Archer, assumes she is a doll-like dolt, but May manages to checkmate both Archer and the woman for whom he develops a clandestine (and unconsummated) passion, Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), in this tournament of social chess. Ryder is so enamoured of the film that she acquired some of the props – reproductions of famous paintings – and is having them framed for her apartment in lower Manhattan.
With the movie’s release, Ryder had what seems to be a characteristic reaction to success: she reverted to childhood. “The night before the premiere, I had done three days of press and my whole family was here in New York, my grandma and everything.” (Ryder’s 92-year-old grandmother was her date for the gala event.) “It was like two in the morning and I couldn’t sleep, and all of a sudden I got this real, like, panic feeling, because everything was happening so fast, and I’d been waiting for this movie to come out for so long, and I was so proud of it, and it was finally coming out and I was nervous and I called my mum and she came over and she slept with me in my bed and I was kind of crying. It wasn’t really a bad thing, it was just like ‘’, you know. And I really felt like her child. My father and I have always had a very intellectual relationship, and my mum treats me like her baby.”
Ryder has just finished two films, , by 23-year-old first-time screenwriter Helen Childress, and The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende’s novel, with Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. (Vincent Gallo, who is also in The House of the Spirits, describes visiting Winona every morning being made up in her trailer. “She would just sing an entire musical from the ’50s, or do a genius imitation of Juliette Lewis. She’s completely full of life.”) “ was my attempt at lightening up and doing a movie about people my age. If it’s not good, it is going to affect me much more than if one of these other movies wasn’t good, because I feel like I’m going to be watched by kids my age, and that’s very important to me. I really want their respect, and I don’t know if I have it. I was in Venice for the film festival with every brilliant director and actor and people I should be so intimidated by, and I was fine. But when I get around people my own age, I’m a wreck. What they think of me is so much more important than what people in the industry think of me. I think it’s just facing my own insecurity. I was not accepted in high school, not in junior high school, not in elementary school. I was always picked on. I never had friends, except for one, Heather. This is going to sound weird, but even after I got famous, kids weren’t nicer to me. I mean I stayed in high school until I was a sophomore. I’d done four movies. I’d done – it was a huge movie. But kids still threw food at me.”
Recently, says Ryder, she has had a kind of epiphany. “I had been feeling a loss of self. Everything that I knew as a child was gone. Friends had died. People had disappeared. Nobody in my family lived together any more – my brothers and sister had grown up and moved away. I felt like I was missing something, and I just wanted to go back and have things be the way they were.”
It didn’t help that she was making a movie in which she was playing the ultimate victim. In The House of the Spirits, Ryder is imprisoned and tortured. But in the end, the experience proved strangely cathartic. Typically, she finds a literary analogy. “In Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet he says, ask yourself if you must write, and if the answer is, ‘Yes, I must,’ then you are a real writer, and if the answer is ‘Well, I guess not’, then you are not. Must I act? Well there are some days when it’s like, yes I must. But I just know that I can be a real artist without being in pain. You always hear that the great artists were the tortured ones. And it’s just boring to me now. People used to say, ‘Oh you are going through a hard time. Use it.’ I don’t buy into that at all.”
Ryder’s next project is , in which she will play Jo. “I never knew it was such a feminist book. I can’t believe how relevant it is. It’s really powerful. I love Louisa May Alcott. Did you know she was like a really big opium fiend? My parents wrote a book about her, as they did about Edith Wharton. And Jo is a real hero of mine.”
But before that, Ryder has some unfinished business: she wants to go to college. She’s about to embark on a cross-country trip with her best friend Heather to check out a few possibilities. It’s not just the education – Ryder probably reads more than most literature professors. It’s finally coming to terms with her peers – and, perhaps, learning to live with herself.
The thunderstorm has ended; a light drizzle drenches Soho as Ryder hops out of the cab. A doorman pops open a protective umbrella as the diminutive star disappears into her building. Like May Welland, she’s a great deal stronger than she looks.
