A few years back there seemed no doubt that Winona Ryder would go on to establish herself as the actress of her generation. Having notched up two Oscar nominations by the time she was 24, as well as being anointed honorary queen of the slacker generation, she had a head start on everyone else. But with the failure of her last three films, to say nothing of the rise of Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, the golden girl of the early 1990s is in danger of looking like yesterday’s icon.
But what she lacked in box-office success, she made up for with credibility: Julia Roberts got the blockbusters, Winona got the critical acclaim. Films such as 1989’s wicked and brilliant high-school parody Heathers helped position Ryder as a favourite with image-aware young audiences, if not with Hollywood financiers. Then there were all those period pieces: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Age of Innocence, Little Women, The Crucible, in which Ryder showed she could hold her own in a corset opposite the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman.
Even when the films themselves had nothing going for them, like 1993’s dire adaptation of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Ryder’s extraordinary looks kept loyal fans watching. Lame scripts or not, canny directors simply closed in on her huge, expressive, brown eyes until they filled the frame. In an age of hyperactive leading ladies, Ryder is unique in that she would have been a huge star in the silent era.
In recent years, though, this appeal seems to have waned. It took Ryder seven years to get her boldest project to date into cinemas. Girl, Interrupted – the tale of a young woman’s experiences in a 1960s mental asylum – signalled her debut as a producer, and was a chance for her to stretch herself as an actress. But the film was only a modest commercial success, with most of the critical plaudits going not to Ryder but to her co-star, Angelina Jolie. Then came Lost Souls, a confused and derivative devil thriller, which finally crept into cinemas almost two years after it was made. And now we have Autumn in New York, a super-slushy romance in the tradition of Love Story, which finds Ryder looking distinctly uncomfortable as a terminally ill milliner who falls for the ever-implausible Richard Gere.
Why not? “Well, I don’t know how people see me, but when I started making movies, I was the girl who was unattractive, ugly, actually described in the script as ‘unattractive'”.
Sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, the 29-year-old Ryder is anything but ugly. Unusually, her short hair is back to its natural light brown and is knotted into dainty little dreads. She’s dressed all in black, with heavy eyeliner accentuating her best-known feature. Tim Burton might have cast her as an oddball teenage witch in Beetlejuice, but it seems ridiculous for her to assert that she’s no beauty. Surely people are constantly telling her the opposite?
What they do want to hear about is her continuing relationship with the musician Beck, whom Ryder accompanied on part of his last European tour. Apart from the common denominator of fame, the pair are also both products of the 1960s counterculture elite. Winona’s father, Michael Horowitz, hung out with Allen Ginsberg and was an early acolyte of Timothy Leary, who was her godfather. Meanwhile her stage surname is taken from jazz musician Mitch Ryder, another favourite of her father’s.
Winona herself describes her parents as “a cross between intellectual beatnik writers and hippies. They weren’t burnt-out hippies, they were productive hippies. My dad still looks like a real beatnik”. Mostly raised in San Francisco, she spent part of her childhood on a commune in northern California, an experience that she didn’t wholly enjoy.
While eager not to hurt her parents’ feelings, or blame them in any way, it seems clear that Ryder is rather more conventional in her tastes. She likes a glass of wine, but isn’t really the sort to be found hugging trees in a haze of smoke. Instead, she collects first editions by authors such as Austen, Orwell and Salinger and moves between houses in LA, San Francisco and New York.