weirdo teenager to pixie waif

to them not knowing what the

hell to do with me,” she told

the New York Times last year.

Part of it was her advancing

age – Hollywood had locked her

in as an ingenue, but she was

no longer young enough to play

one – though it was also the

public’s perception of her that

had changed.

In 2001, the year she turned

30, Ryder had her infamous

shoplifting arrest and, in one

move – caught on CCTV – she

lost her innocence. After that

she had small roles here and

there, mainly playing the love

interest or the older oddball. Her

starlet alter ego was officially

extinguished before she turned

40, when she played “The

Dying Swan”, the corpse-like

leading dancer opposite Natalie

Portman’s flushing prima

ballerina in Black Swan. “I felt

like for the first time in a long

time people

really responded

to me,” Ryder

said. “That was

a very liberating

thing, because I

was playing my

age. In my mind,

and I think in a

lot of people’s

minds, that really

helped. I sort of

graduated.”

But graduating

implies some

inona Ryder first
became a mother on
film when she was 36.
In 2007, she was hired by Star
Trek reboot director JJ Abrams
to play Spock’s mum. It was a
cameo and only a handful of
lines – basically amounting to her
being a proud mother – before
she fell off a cliff. Abrams had
chosen Ryder as an homage to
Richard Donner’s Superman, in
which the supporting roles were
also filled with known faces. “I
thought it would be great to have
an actress who people would
recogni se,” Abrams said at the
time. And they did, only this was
an actress they recognised for her
adolescence, not her adulthood.
Now aged 45, icon of youth
or not, Ryder is an undeniable
adult and adulthood for women
means motherhood. She has
played a mother three more
times on screen and each time
it has been a variation on an
age-old Hollywood theme. “If
a woman doesn’t have kids,
she’s a monster,” says Kathleen
Karlyn, author of Unruly
Girls, Unrepentant Mothers:
Redefining Feminism on Screen.
“If she does have kids and she
doesn’t make her life revolve
around her kids and her husband
she’s a bad mother.”
Before this era of her working
life the last major starring role
of Ryder’s film career was Girl,
Interrupted in 1999, when she
JON FARMER/NEW LINE; ALLSTAR/COLUMBIA; UNITED ARTISTSwas 28 playing 18. “I went from

After a career spent playing a misfi t and

ingenue, depicting the mother in Stranger

Things has given Winona Ryder’s career

a new lease of life, says Soraya Roberts

Winona:

Resurrection

ence. After that

roles here and

playing the loveoo

olderoddball.Her

o was officially

before she turned

played “The

the corpse-like

r opposite Natalie

hing prima

ack Swan. “I felt

t time in a long

ed

s

ng

I

y

nd,

a

ally

of

ing

Stranger

Things

Special

W