Please Rewind Talent Wall

Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder has always been especially good at characters who see the strangeness around them before anyone else does. Born in Winona on October 29, 1971, she began taking acting lessons at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater at 12. An early screen role in Lucas led to the run of films that established her particular presence: watchful, dryly funny and entirely at home among outsiders. After seeing Ryder in Lucas, Tim Burton cast her as the goth teenager at the center of Beetlejuice. Heathers gave that teenage disaffection a sharper edge, placing her inside a dark satire of high-school popularity that later became a cult film. Reuniting with Burton for Edward Scissorhands, Ryder played the female lead opposite Johnny Depp, bringing warmth to a romantic fantasy built around loneliness and difference. Her 1990s work moved comfortably between heightened genre filmmaking and literary adaptations. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she took the dual role of Mina Murray and Princess Elisabeta. As Jo March in Little Women, she brought spark and confidence to one of literature’s most determined young women, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Alien Resurrection then sent her into harder-edged science fiction as the android Call, while Being John Malkovich added another singularly strange film to her screen history. Ryder also starred in and executive-produced Girl, Interrupted before taking a four-year career hiatus beginning in 2001. Her return included independent films, a supporting role in Black Swan and another major chapter with Stranger Things. As Joyce Byers, the mother searching for her missing son, she turned anxious energy and fierce resolve into the performance’s driving force; the cast won a Screen Actors Guild Award for its ensemble work in 2017. Across teen satire, gothic romance, period drama, science fiction and television horror, Ryder’s best work shares a recognizable tension. She can appear vulnerable without seeming passive, guarded without becoming remote. That quality is why movies such as Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands and Little Women remain so rewarding to revisit.