Winona Ryder Bites Back

"What makes someone an icon? Is Nelson Mandela an icon? Is Václav Havel an icon? Is the alien from Alien: Resurrection an icon? I don’t know what the requirements are.” Winona Ryder pauses to consider the well-oiled word from the far reaches of the lobby lounge at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. Her cap is pulled down to hide the face of an Edward Gorey beauty rendered in chalk. She sits on her tiny feet as if to keep them warm.

When our waiter arrives with two blistering cups of English breakfast tea, the green-eyed actress wonders if Philip Roth might fit the part of icon. By the time the tea has cooled into twin lakes of still cream three hours later, she has settled on Empty Nest’s Kristy McNichol. “But,” she says, “I would never consider myself anything like that.”

Two decades into her film career, and two years shy of 40, Ryder has developed from a doe-eyed ingénue into a full-grown, albeit delicate, woman. And after a nine-year retreat from the spotlight, the actress who personified the knowing malaise of the late ’80s and early ’90s—as the beautiful freak in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, the homicidal girl-next-door in Michael Lehmann’s Heathers and the idealistic videographer in Ben Stiller’s Gen X-defining classic Reality Bites—finally returns with The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, an impeccable arthouse film starring Robin Wright Penn, Blake Lively and Keanu Reeves.

Whereas the younger, more exposed Ryder was the portrait of a tortured thespian on the verge of a breakdown, the grown Ryder seems comfortable in her own skin. And unlike most teen actors who devolve into twisted shells of their former selves, the bookish star has gracefully matured, despite a journey neither straight nor narrow.

Top Image: Shirt by Gucci. Ryder’s own ring.