Meet
The Happy Couple
Select, July 1991
By Lucy O'Brien
The crisp white tablecloths groan
with untouched bowls of fruit, sumptuous bouquets and plates of costly
biscuits, in case the occupent feels the slightest twinge of hunger.
It's the full Hollywood starlet number, par for the course for anyone
with an immaculate complexion, nine major movies to their credit and a
designer Manhatten loft which she shares with fiance and notorious
movie-world bad boy Johnny Depp. But this is a Hollywood starlet with a
difference. She's only 19.
Winona Ryder is at ease alternately
sipping cough syrup and lighting Camels. Despite a recurring
respiratory infection that cost her a part in Godfather III, she sticks
defiently to her vices. Uncannily, she resembles her public image - the
post-punk bohemian who plays pool and has a passion for the Cocteau
Twins, The Replacements and Tom Waits. Slight and elegant, yet quietly
tough. You don't get so far so fast without self-assurance to spare.
"I got beat up a few times in High
School. Everyone thought I was a boy cos I had really short hair and
dressed like a boy. A group of guys hit me in the stomach and banged my
head into a locker so I go stitches. They were calling me a faggot and
I was, like, But wait - I'm a girl! They didn't believe me at first,
but felt bad when they found out the truth later.
"I thought it was cool. I felt like a
gangster. I got to wear a bandage on my head. I went home and looked at
myself in the mirror, smoked a cigarette and thought, Yeah.
"I was having such a bad time I had
to get out and do something, and I thought acting class would put me
around more interesting people. That's where I got discovered."
The daughter of a Beatnik bookseller
and video artist, Winona grew up in Petaluma, Northern California
surrounded by '60s intellectuals like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary.
"I don't think he's got a fried
brain," she says of her godfather Leary. "We weren't hippies living in
a commune. We lived in the country but weren't, like, dropping acid in
the fields."
Five years ago, an LA casting
director dropped into her acting class and selected Winona to play a
teenager in the coming-of-age movie Lucas. By '88 she'd landed the part
of Lydia - the deadpan daughter dressed in funereal black in Tim
Burton's comic hit Beetlejuice - who establishes an exclusive hotline
to the ghosts haunting her family's home.
"In Beetlejuice those were all my own
clothes. I certainly looked and was considered weird, and I've always
identified with the darker roles."
For her next big film, the satirical
Heathers, Winona starred with Christian Slater as the sweet-faced
leader of a High School gang, with a cutting tongue. The film examined
teen suicide, and Winona was later criticised for sending it up.
"Heathers was showing how horrible
society can be when a tragedy happens. I had a friend who killed
himself in High School and afterwards people were saying, Oh, he was so
great. People treated him like shit when he was alive, they never gave
him the time of day. Then I read the script for Heathers and it was
perfect.
"When you see all those sappy
made-for-TV movies about teen suicide when you kill yourself and
everyone's your best friend and at the funeral, it's enough to make you
jump in front of a bus. It's a fantasy for teenagers to get all that
attention and it's dangerous. Heathers showed how screwed up that all
was."
Winona's next challenge is making the
transiton from teen actress to more mature roles. To avoid type casting
and the brat pack tag, she has steered clear of slushy teen movies like
The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink, choosing parts that strike an
inner chord. This will probably be her career's saving grace.
Winona's acting style is subtle,
understating characters rather than projecting herself madly. So much
so that in Great Balls Of Fire, as the 13-year-old bride of rocker
Jerry Lee Lewis, Winona was asked to 'act up'.
"My style is more internal. I don't
like watching actresses who think, I'm real cos I have all these
mannerisms. "In Great Balls Of Fire everybody was, like, way up here
and I had to crank myself so at least I'd look like I was in the same
movie as them! That was the biggest I've ever been. I still watch that
and go, Ugh."
Last year's enviable role as Al
Pacino and Diane Keaton's daughter in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather
III could have marked Winona's move into more mature roles, but nervous
exhaustion forced her to pull out of the picture.
Gossip as to why she'd quit was rife:
she was pregnant; she had had a nervous breakdown; Johnny Depp had
steered her away from Godfather III so that she could appear with him
in Edward Scissorhands.
Also there was near mutiny on set
when Coppola cast his daughter Sofia in Winona's role. Sofia's acting
inabilities were painfully apparent and diminished the film's
credibility, while to Hollywood gossip-mongers Winona had made her
first big career blunder.
"Of course it was a disappointment.
Who wouldn't want to be in Godfather III? People love to see you screw
up."
Still, Winona has another chance of
working with Coppola this summer, playing the "love interest" in his
faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
"It's a period piece, set in England
in the 1800s, so I'll have to do an accent. I'm really nervous cos when
Americans try to do English accents the English really don't buy it!"
The disappointment that Winona felt
about pulling out of Godfather III was partly offset by working with
cult director Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train) on a film that is as yet
untitled. Then there's her latest movie Mermaids, starring alongside
Cher in what must be the partnership of the season - Winona also
dances, pretty hopelessly, in the video for Cher's recent number one
single, 'The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss)'.
In this '60s comedy drama, Cher plays
a tarty mother, in and out of relationships. Winona plays her mixed-up
15-year-old daughter Charlotte who can't decide whether to be a nun or
a sex queen. In Mermaids, Winona takes a brave stab at making the
implausible plausible.
"It was very exaggerated, but things
are exaggerated at that age. I saw her as the epitome of inconsistent
teen angst. You reach a point where you stop communicating because you
can't articulate what you're feeling. You assume your parents can read
your mind. You're confused, they're confused, it's a party of
confusion."
With similar dark hair and eyes, Cher
and Winona make a striking mother/daughter pair on screen. At first
Winona was wary of working with America's top female rock star but Cher
soon proved to be a valuable ally.
Cher has a reputation for flying off
the handle if things aren't going her way. The first two directors of
Mermaids, Lasse Hallstrom and Frank Oz, were asked to quit after they
tried to bring out a more 'artistic' side to the film. Cue Cher's
immortal comment: "It's a comedy, not fucking Chekhov."
Keeping out of such politics, Winona
got support and advice from the battle-scarred Cher.
"Making the film, I was 17 and just
being introduced to the tabloids. Suddenly people are curious about
things you wouldn't even tell your friends. She's been through that her
whole life - she taught me what I should take seriously and what I
should let go."
At the time Winona was in the
spotlight having just got engaged to Johnny Depp, the 26-year-old
gunslinger who came to LA eight years ago, intent on becoming a rock
musician but who became an actor instead. Depp soon made his name as a
heart-throb via the TV series 21 Jump Street and in kitsch movies like
John Waters' Cry Baby, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind him. As
he'd been engaged twice before to aspiring starlets, when his union
with Winona was announced, car bumper stickers appeared in Manhattan
saying, 'Honk If You've Never Been Engaged To Johnny Depp'.
"People assume it bothers me that
he's been engaged before, but it really doesn't. We have a connection
on a deeper level. We have the same colouring but we're from very
different backgrounds, so we're interested in each other the whole
time."
For Edward Scissorhands (which opens
here in July) Winona was playing opposite Depp. It also reunited her
with Beetlejuice director Tim Burton.
Scissorhands explores yet another
side of the peer pressure of the American teenage nightmare. The film
is a gothic '90s fairytale in which Winona plays Kim a sunny, blonde
suburban cheerleader who falls in love with Edward (Depp) - a freakish
human creation devised by an eccentric inventor who died before
completing the project. Edward is a normal(ish) human being with one
highly original feature - instead of hands he has an arsenal of sharp
pointy objects.
"Physically, my role in Scissorhands
was everything I'd been anti throughout my whole life. But the reason
she fell in love with Edward was because she felt different. She was
trying to live this perfect, normal all-American teenager life, but
she's not like that inside.
"That's what attracted me. That
inside she's really weird."