Every family has those communal stories, told over the years, until eventually, every member more or less believes they were in the room when it happened. It’s similar to the way I feel about the actor Winona Ryder: I have heard and read so much about her that it feels impossible that I did not witness some of the things I know first hand.
It’s very difficult to look away when Ryder is on screen. She looks like a woodland creature, a startled deer – plus, she can act. I must have first seen her in Mermaids, in which she played Cher’s daughter, a rebelliously religious teen in 60s America. Then there was black comedy Heathers, and Beetlejuice. Too young to see these films at the cinema when they first came out, I swallowed them up in a glut of VHS in the mid-90s
Her voice has a pleading quality – see me, hear me – without sounding needy. Rather, she always sounds sure of herself, even when playing chronically hesitant characters, like the wannabe film-maker in Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites. She played Jo March in Little Women, and I understood the character for the first time. Then there was the rest: those big soulful eyes, her stillness. In hindsight, her look can be distilled in two words: “the 90s”.
It would be weird to talk about Ryder and not mention her grand love affair with Johnny Depp, or that infamous 2001 shoplifting incident, when she stole designer clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue. But I care less about both these things than the knowledge that she’s heading back to my screens: there’s talk of a Netflix series and even a Beetlejuice sequel. I can’t wait to see her again.
