As her handsome boyfriend Johnny Depp gets set to leave their hotel suite with its long view of Central Park, young actress Winona Ryder says goodbye. Their eyes lock for one forlorn instant: He is going out to play. She must stay in and first finish her chores.
For an early-morning interview, she is dressed in jeans, a sweat shirt and worn construction boots. No makeup. Depp`s diamond solitaire shines on her left hand. Starlet getup, 1990s version.
She is small, thin and delicate, with pale white skin offset by dark black hair. She appears nearly transparent, with emotions close to the skin. As she speaks, the thoughts flit across her face, changeable as a
kaleidoscope.
But barely 19, with nine movies to her credit, she is neither fragile flower nor silly teen queen. She can be fiercely determined, and-as befits her age-not a little overdramatic. A few years ago she said that, after reading the script for the wicked black comedy ”Heathers,” she thought: ”If I don`t do this movie, I`ll never be able to live with myself. And I`ll kill whoever does do it.”
Tim Burton, who directed her in both ”Beetlejuice” and the recent release ”Edward Scissorhands,” has said of Ryder that she is ”someone who moves instinctively closer to the dark than the light.”
For roles in such films as ”Lucas,” ”Heathers” and ”Great Balls of Fire,” in which she played Myra, rocker Jerry Lee Lewis` 13-year-old cousin and wife, Ryder has played the oddball, the misfit, the outsider.
In her two recent releases, ”Mermaids” and ”Edward Scissorhands,” she again portrays a character at odds, although they are very different parts-in ”Scissorhands,” which co-stars Depp as the sweet, woeful boy who has shears instead of hands, Ryder plays Kim, a blond cheerleader who comes to love Edward.
At first, Kim seems a happy, unquestioning denizen of director Burton`s unreal suburban landscape of Necco-wafer-colored houses. But ”she really isn`t that at all,” Ryder says. Before meeting Edward, Kim has ”never seen anything different, unusual or strange. She sees herself in him-someone desperately wanting to touch and not being able to.”
In ”Mermaids,” as Cher`s daughter, she plays 15-year-old Charlotte Flax. Fatherless and confused, dressed in buttoned-up shapeless dresses and clunky boots, she swings wildly between piety-wanting to be a nun, although Jewish-and passion, lusting after the handsome church gardener. ”I`ve never read a character like her,” Ryder says. ”She`s not a rebel, she just has her own thing going.”
These are not classic teen movies, as the actress likes to point out. Not the kind of teen movies where ”the whole point is to get to go to the prom.” Ryder has never been to a prom, or to any high school dance, for that matter. School for her was a ”nightmare,” she says. And not simply because she, unlike the other students, was appearing in movies from age 13. Her classmates, she says as she fiddles with her engagement ring, ”were horrible to me before that.” In the suburbs of northern California, she was the girl with a crew cut who loved the Sex Pistols. (She completed her last two years of high school education, earning straight A`s, at home.)
No wonder Ryder became obsessed by ”Heathers”; the script has become her bible. ”There were Heathers in my high school,” she says. In the film, the three Heathers were the most popular girls in school, a vacuous bunch, all killed off by Ryder and her rebel boyfriend in what appear to be suicides. Asked what she is doing after the first Heather`s funeral, Ryder`s character says: ”I dunno. Mourn, maybe watch some TV.”
”Sometimes I feel like one of those Vietnam veterans: I`m not out of it,” Ryder says of the vicious high school satire. ”(`Heathers`) is the only thing I`ve ever done that I was completely there even when I was not filming. I still have it in me-which is frightening.” She can, fortunately, laugh at herself about this. ”The writer, producer and director must wonder `When is she going to get over it?` ” Ryder says.
Although not the typical pupil, Ryder never really thought of herself as odd. ”When you have a great family and are really connected, you never consider yourself different.”
She was born in Winona, Minn., the town for which she was named. Her parents, Michael and Cynthia Horowitz, are liberal-minded intellectuals who moved to northern California when Winona, one of four children, was an infant. Her father sells rare books; her mother makes educational videos. Her godfather is one of the counterculture`s godfathers, Timothy Leary. She grew up in an atmosphere where everything was discussed, where she was treated as a person, not merely a child.
”We`re very close,” she says of her relationship with her parents. ”As close as a daughter could be. They know everything about me and vice versa.
”Some actors are very messed up. I ask myself why have I escaped rehab, getting into drugs, going to clubs, and I always come back to my parents as the reason.”
When her peers began experimenting with LSD or other substances, Ryder felt free to ask her parents what these drugs were about. They explained what the effects were, what she might experience. ”They took the mystery out of all these things that make kids want to do it. I no longer had the urge. I thank them for that,” she says.
Such grounding would be important when stardom hit. Nothing in her life had prepared her for its force-what could? The publicity mills began after
”Beetlejuice” (1988) in which she played Lydia, a haunted teen (”My whole life is a dark room. One. Big. Dark. Room.”) and gathered steam when she had to play love scenes with Dennis Quaid, twice her age, for ”Great Balls of Fire,” a much-hyped movie that turned out to be a bomb.
But it wasn`t until she fell in love with Depp, the teen dream star of Fox`s ”21 Jump Street,” that the supermarket tabloids began stalking the actress and her 27-year fiance. With their youth and their dark good looks, they were the perfect tabloid fodder. He had been ”engaged” before to young actresses Jennifer Grey and ”Twin Peaks` ” Sherilyn Fenn (although Ryder says ”engaged” is a typical media exaggeration). But now, Depp has ”Winona Forever” tattooed on his shoulder. She watched while he had it done.
”I`m shocked at the assumptions the press, the paparazzi, the tabloids make: We own you,” Ryder says, her dark eyes wide. ”I`ve been tripped so they can get my picture while I`m on the ground.”
”Some of them are nice,” she quickly adds. She then acknowledges it could be worse. ”I haven`t been a totally abused starlet,” she says, with self-mocking emphasis on the word ”starlet.”
After Depp, no one seemed to be interested in her work any more, only her love life. The mere mention of him makes her look wary. ”I hate talking about my relationship. It exploits something that means something to me,” she says. Another painful, unavoidable, subject is Francis Ford Coppola`s ”The Godfather Part III.” Last December, just after wrapping ”Mermaids,” Ryder flew to Rome, where she was to play Al Pacino`s daughter in the epic sequel. She flew home without appearing in a single frame of film.
Rumors circulated: It was drugs, it was Depp, it was a nervous breakdown, it was nervous exhaustion. ”I was too sick,” Ryder says now of the respiratory illness that plagued her through the final weeks of ”Mermaids.” ”People hate that it`s that simple.”
”It was very painful,” she adds. ”I love Coppola; I would have loved to have worked with him.”
