Why Hollywood Wouldn't Let Winona Ryder Grow Up
[The original article, by Joe Blevins, can be found here. I feel like Winona Ryder's situation applies to so many current and former young actresses.]
In the late '80s and early '90s, thanks to a string of off-kilter hits like Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Edward Scissorhands, young Winona Ryder became America's unlikely sweetheart: dark, waifish, quirky, and somehow eternally innocent yet wise beyond her years. Now age 44, Winona is working steadily in film and on TV, but in the minds of many fans and studio executives, the actress is still associated with her beguiling adolescent image.
Winona reunited with her Mermaids little sister Christina Ricci at 2008 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week
This is the dilemma at the heart of Winona Forever, a thoughtful career respective by Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt. The title of the article refers to a famous tattoo once sported by Johnny Depp, Winona's boyfriend of two years and, in many ways, her male equivalent in the movie business. The article points out that Winona and Johnny emerged around the same time and were both seen as dark, off-beat alternatives to more generic, A-list celebrities like Tom Cruise and Molly Ringwald. So why has Johnny Depp, now 52, been allowed to age and take on a wide variety of roles, while Winona has been relegated to secondary parts as girlfriends, wives, and mothers?
The article follows Winona over the course of her three-decade career in show business, beginning when she was a genuinely misunderstood teenage outsider obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. In those early days, she embodied the roles that she played onscreen. She didn't have to pretend to be a morbid, wide-eyed misfit, because that's who she really was back then. At the time, Winona told a reporter that finding roles for strong women had been easy for her; great parts seemed to fall into her lap in those days. Her career peaked with back-to-back Oscar nods in the mid-'90s, in the lead category for Little Women, and in the supporting category for The Age of Innocence, where she played the naive, wealthy young socialite that Daniel Day-Lewis chooses over the unconventional love interest his own age (Michelle Pfeiffer). Around the same time, Winona became the subject of tabloid fascination, first for her romance with Depp, then for a string of relationships with rock musicians.
Barbara Hershey, Winona, Mila Kunis, and Natalie Portman at a Black Swan gala, November 2010
Well into her 20's, in films like Reality Bites or Girl, Interrupted, Winona was still playing more late teens/delayed adolescents than adults. This a common dilemma for young actresses; Mae Whitman and Vanessa Hudgens, now both in their late 20's, recently played high schoolers in The Duff and Grease: Live! In Winona's case, Soraya Roberts theorizes that she was unable to move on because of what moving on meant. And we weren't, either. Our nostalgia keeps her cloistered to this day in adolescence, alongside then-boyfriend Johnny Depp, before he successfully cashed in on his eccentricity. But despite our attempts to resuscitate the past - Beetlejuice 2, Heathers: The Musical, Marc Jacobs - and as young as Winona continues to look, she is no longer that '90s ingénue.
Today, Winona Ryder exists in a weird career limbo: she's not really accepted as an adult, but she's no longer the teenage girl that she once was. Like Rachel McAdams, 37 - see Why Rachel McAdams Never Became Movie Star - Winona is now mostly limited to supporting roles to prop up male stars: the mother of Zachary Quinto, only six years her junior, in Star Trek (2009), the wife of Kevin James in the lazy comedy The Dilemma (2011), Michael Shannon's wife in The Iceman (2012), Peter Sarsgaard's wife in Experimenter (2015). Soraya Roberts' article culminates with a sad anecdote about Winona trimming her trademark eyelashes because a director didn’t want her character to have "Winona eyes." The actress, it seems, remains a prisoner of her illustrious past.
Winona and Peter Sarsgaard at the Experimenter Q&A at the 2015 New York Film Festival
In the late '80s and early '90s, thanks to a string of off-kilter hits like Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Edward Scissorhands, young Winona Ryder became America's unlikely sweetheart: dark, waifish, quirky, and somehow eternally innocent yet wise beyond her years. Now age 44, Winona is working steadily in film and on TV, but in the minds of many fans and studio executives, the actress is still associated with her beguiling adolescent image.
Winona reunited with her Mermaids little sister Christina Ricci at 2008 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week
This is the dilemma at the heart of Winona Forever, a thoughtful career respective by Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt. The title of the article refers to a famous tattoo once sported by Johnny Depp, Winona's boyfriend of two years and, in many ways, her male equivalent in the movie business. The article points out that Winona and Johnny emerged around the same time and were both seen as dark, off-beat alternatives to more generic, A-list celebrities like Tom Cruise and Molly Ringwald. So why has Johnny Depp, now 52, been allowed to age and take on a wide variety of roles, while Winona has been relegated to secondary parts as girlfriends, wives, and mothers?
The article follows Winona over the course of her three-decade career in show business, beginning when she was a genuinely misunderstood teenage outsider obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. In those early days, she embodied the roles that she played onscreen. She didn't have to pretend to be a morbid, wide-eyed misfit, because that's who she really was back then. At the time, Winona told a reporter that finding roles for strong women had been easy for her; great parts seemed to fall into her lap in those days. Her career peaked with back-to-back Oscar nods in the mid-'90s, in the lead category for Little Women, and in the supporting category for The Age of Innocence, where she played the naive, wealthy young socialite that Daniel Day-Lewis chooses over the unconventional love interest his own age (Michelle Pfeiffer). Around the same time, Winona became the subject of tabloid fascination, first for her romance with Depp, then for a string of relationships with rock musicians.
Barbara Hershey, Winona, Mila Kunis, and Natalie Portman at a Black Swan gala, November 2010
Well into her 20's, in films like Reality Bites or Girl, Interrupted, Winona was still playing more late teens/delayed adolescents than adults. This a common dilemma for young actresses; Mae Whitman and Vanessa Hudgens, now both in their late 20's, recently played high schoolers in The Duff and Grease: Live! In Winona's case, Soraya Roberts theorizes that she was unable to move on because of what moving on meant. And we weren't, either. Our nostalgia keeps her cloistered to this day in adolescence, alongside then-boyfriend Johnny Depp, before he successfully cashed in on his eccentricity. But despite our attempts to resuscitate the past - Beetlejuice 2, Heathers: The Musical, Marc Jacobs - and as young as Winona continues to look, she is no longer that '90s ingénue.
Today, Winona Ryder exists in a weird career limbo: she's not really accepted as an adult, but she's no longer the teenage girl that she once was. Like Rachel McAdams, 37 - see Why Rachel McAdams Never Became Movie Star - Winona is now mostly limited to supporting roles to prop up male stars: the mother of Zachary Quinto, only six years her junior, in Star Trek (2009), the wife of Kevin James in the lazy comedy The Dilemma (2011), Michael Shannon's wife in The Iceman (2012), Peter Sarsgaard's wife in Experimenter (2015). Soraya Roberts' article culminates with a sad anecdote about Winona trimming her trademark eyelashes because a director didn’t want her character to have "Winona eyes." The actress, it seems, remains a prisoner of her illustrious past.
Winona and Peter Sarsgaard at the Experimenter Q&A at the 2015 New York Film Festival