Winona Ryder Bites Back

Shirt by Alice + Olivia. Jacket by Hanii Y. Ryder’s Own Rings.

Constant media scrutiny—compounded by exhaustion and the normal anxieties of a woman about to turn 20—convinced Ryder to seek psychological treatment in 1990. “I remember waking up one morning,” she says of her breaking point. “I looked in the mirror and thought, Am I going crazy? So I checked myself into a hospital where I stayed for a few days. I was surrounded by people who had been molested and abused. I felt like they hated me, didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there and wanted me to get the hell out because what the fuck did I have to complain about?” A smile builds across her face when she adds, “When it was my turn to talk in group therapy sessions, I was like, I’m just really tired because it’s hard to be famous.”

Out of her experience at the hospital came an appreciation for the marginalized women she met during her stay. And then Ryder cracked the spine of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir about life in a psychiatric institution. “What I found so interesting,” says Ryder, “was that if you did something sort of normal-crazy, like taking a bottle of aspirin, you were locked up for years. Now, they won’t hold you if you say you’re schizophrenic and you’re going to kill yourself or someone else. You can thank Reagan for that one.” In 1999, after years spent trying to adapt the book to film, Ryder starred in and produced Girl, Interrupted, for which Angelina Jolie won the Academy Award for best supporting actress.

It was Ryder’s first serious bid for critical acclaim since her Oscar-nominated turn in Nicholas Hytner’s 1996 version of The Crucible. But members of the press were quick to reduce Ryder to a scorned actress overshadowed by a rebellious, brother-kissing man-eater with chaise-lounge lips. “I never had any bad feelings about Angelina,” she says. “And I was hurt that people thought that. Everyone assumed I was really jealous because I thought this would be my vehicle. We said from the very beginning that the actress who played Lisa would probably win an Oscar, because it was the big, great, showy part. But I always related to Susanna.” In a way, Ryder was responsible for jump-starting Jolie’s career. “I fought very hard for her to have that part, and I never really felt like I got the chance to know her.” Did Jolie ever personally thank her? “I feel like it won’t read in print very nicely if I say that wasn’t really her style,” she says. “But she seems to be a completely different person now.”