An Alien named Winona
On the silverscreen
Winona will now be seen as an andriod. No wonder cause she's not of
this world
Von Wolfgang H๖bel Stern
magazine 11/1997
If men are mesmerized by a beautiful women they get the strangest ideas. An american guy named Matthew Sweet went to cinema a few years ago, watched Edward Scissorhands and immediatly fell in love with the lead actress. Such things are known to happen. But as Matthew Sweet was just just beginning to start his career as singer, he went home and wrote a song about the woman of his dreams.
In his song "Winona" Matthew Sweet sings about dialing the number of Winona Ryder and is pained by jealousy as her phoneline is busy. He's thinking about having a psychological problem, asking if Winona couldn't be the star in his life and finally wails out his loneliness. Such things must go wrong: As Sweet sent his work to Winona thru a befriended journalist Winona allegdly said Sweet should relocate to another galaxy.
But as there're many men in the world like Sweet, as some other singers named their album "For The Beauty Of Winona Ryder" or simply called their whole band "The Winona Ryders", as the poet lovers compared her brown eyes with coffee-filled saucers or mountainlakes in autumn, the actress Winona Ryder teaches them all a pretty little lesson: After crawling one hour together with muscle-packed fighters of whom most have their pants full and wanting to get her clothes off thru flith and water filled tunnels a big round shoots a big ugly hole into her midsection. But as even this hole can't harm her even the dumbest viewer got the message: "She's not human". Winona Ryder is not of this world.
In "Alien Ressurection" Winona Ryder stars as Call. She's an android, a robot in human form, a robot trained to kill. For all cineasts who saw Ryder as smart but chainsmoking cabdriver in "Night on Earth", as beautiful but pain-haunted woman in "The House Of Spirits" or as cool but sensible slacker in "Reality Bites" is this new Winona a strange new twist: How could a woman, most likely directly fallen from heaven, this frail and amazing one meter and sixtytwo petite be suddenly a fighting machine?
The first question answers Winona Ryder herself. "Cause I always wanted to", she says with a charming smile and remembers how she loved the first "Alien" when ten years old. "Alien" heroine Sigourney Weaver now side-by-side fighting the ugly slimey monsters from outer space was "the first role-model for me in cinema. The first female action hero!".
But Ryder's will only wouldn't have given "Alien Ressurection" the charmes that this movie truely has. That the role of Call really works is thanks to french director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He instructed Ryder to stop lifting heavy iron barbells which she started in preperation of the role "cause it would have been redicioulus" and changed the screenplay. In the movie there're only two beeings that are capable of true emotions: Ryder's Call, the android, and Sigourney Weaver's Ripley, a product out of the cloning labs. Robots and mutants are the better poeple here.
The question arising out of this grim morale is kept unanswered by Winona Ryder. Instead she makes some faces, whirles her hands furiously in the air and says how proud she is of beeing cast in the latest installment of "Alien" which "is already a part of global pop-culture."
That the fourth part of the 1979 started movie series will be a big success is a given. On the one side thanks to the with 48 years still tough, sporty and again wonderful Sigourney Weaver and on the other side thanks to casting Winona Ryder. And Winona is as you've most probably read in nearly every magazine the last years not only "the most beautiful woman in Hollywood" but also an "icon of her generation".
Winona Ryder is 26. Between "Alien" and her first role in the teenager comedy "Lucas" she has done 18 movies in eleven years. She starred in rather weird movies like "Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael", in ambitious costume dramas like "Age Of Innocence" and "The Crucible", in the tearjaker "How To Make An American Quilt" she was THE All American Girl and was nominated twice for the Oscar. None of her movies were a real blockbuster, the biggest box-office to date was made by "Bram Stokers Dracula" in which the vampire greedily jams his teeth into Ryders bust.
The magic of Winona Ryder can't be explained with numbers. Not with her attested IQ of over 160 after which nobody dared to ask any further questions concerning her not continuing to college after high school. Not with the height of her per-movie income, about which she seems not rather concerned about allegdly offering Micheal Lehmann to play for one Dollar the lead in his movie "Heathers", well she finally got a few more. But more likely if you look at her fansites on the internet were Winona fans chat about their heroine.
That her true surname is Horowitz and that her maiden name is based on a small village in the middle of nowhere, that she's smoking in four of her twenty movies, that her parents were once hippies and are now running a bookstore near to San Francisco, that her parents were close friends to drug-prophet Timothy Leary who finally became Winona's godfather, that Winonas brother was named after russian hero and cosmonaut Jurij Gagarin all these valueble information are today known by millions of poeple worldwide.
"Thanks to god she's not like all other girls" says author David Wild in a recently published hommage to Winona Ryder a wonderful hardcover (Winona Ryder, by the editors of US magazine vulcannonibird). But for the mystery as WHY Winona is such a magic object even David Wild has no defenitive answer: her intelligence and sheer variety and ability in front of the camera, her self-confidence when choosing roles, her stubborness in keeping decsisions, her ability to keep true to herself and of course her out-of-this world beauty all just parts of the answer.
Of course Winona is so beautiful that you're foced to kneel before such beauty. Even inside a big airless conference room were about a dozen journalists try to ask intelligent questions about "Alien" and despite Winona's girlish smiles and giggling she turns this into a magic place. Ryder loves stories about catastrophies. How she was beaten up hard by a few boys at school who thought she was gay due to her short black hair. Or why she was so feared by the underwater sequences in Alien. "At twelwe years old a rip-current got me while bathing in the sea. I simply was drowned. As they dragged me out of the water I wasn't breathing. I was dead for thirteen minutes before they brought me back to life." She tells those stories with her eyes wide open, wildly gesticulating but nevertheless beeing the center of calm. As if telling a soothing good-night fairy tale.
Some poeple try to explain the mass-phenomenen Winona Ryder by declaring her Hollywood's first real popstar. Supporting this agrument are the facts that Winona is a regular guest at pop concerts, that she's wooed by some famous singers and that she was in a relationsship with "Soul Asylum" leadsinger Dave Pirner. Next to that her former boyfriend Johnny Depp is also playing in a band when he's not doing another movie. And were did she get her stage name? From bluesrock bore Mitch Ryder which record was just happen to be playing while family Horowitz was just discussing the Hollywood compatible renaming of her starting to be famous daughter.
On the other hand there're poeple who simply declare Winona beeing the reincarnation of Audrey Hepburn. But didn't Winona consequently deny the world of all those Holly Golightly's in "Night On Earth"? And didn't the cigarette behind her ear look far better than to play a society girly with a long pointy cigarette holder in a "Beakfast At Tiffanys" remake? Ryder's favourite writer is not Truman Capote but a woman named Jane Austen.
No, Winona magic hasn't been solved yet. But that might change soon if her fans are able to add two and two together. It stands out that in two of her most memorable movies "Edward Scissorhands" and "Beetlejuice" she's surrounded by strange out-of-this-earth creatures. Next to that the company with Count Dracula seemed to please her. Recently she was seen at the New York concert of the british band Radiohead which latest hit is "Paranoid Android". How did she manage to be dead for thirteen minutes without any harm which role is she just playing in "Alien"? The answer is: Winona Ryder comes from a galaxy far, far away and is only visiting our planet!
As said, if men are mesmerized by a woman they get the most stange ideas...