Winona Ryder ID Card

When Winona Ryder was seven years old she resided at Rainbow, a commune near Elk, California, with seven other families on a 300-acre (1.2 km²) plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or televisions, Winona Ryder took to reading. Her mother showed her some films on a screen, which perhaps led her to develop an interest in what would later make up her career. At age 10 Winona moved again to Petaluma, California. She was harassed her first week of junior high school there when a group of bullies mistook her for an effeminate, scrawny boy. This led her to be schooled at home that year, but she also spent time attending the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she started taking acting lessons.

In 1985, Ryder sent a video audition to appear in the film Desert Bloom, but was rejected. However, David Seltzer, a writer and director, soon noticed her and cast her for his 1986 film Lucas for a role of a teenage outcast, falling in love, but ignored, by the main character. When asked how she wanted her name to appear in the credits, she suggested Ryder as a Mitch Ryder album of her father's played in the background.

Her next movie was Square Dance (1987) (called "a remarkable debut" by The Los Angeles Times), where her teenage character creates a bridge between two alien worlds/plot devices - a traditional farm in the middle of nowhere and a Big City. Her role concentrates on a profound question: how much of our behaviour perceived by the outside world is inherent to us and how much comes from acting the social role under pressure of the society, in a way that society considers "proper" and ethical implications coming from this classical conflict of interest, which she later had a chance to make perfect in The Age of Innocence.

In 1989, she starred in a now cult movie - Heathers, which her agent thought was bad for her career. Her character is opposed to violence as a way to resolve conflicts and is able to express her views by stopping major violent accidents from happening. Again her character struggles, forced to choose between the will of mad society and her own heart - she wins that battle by choosing neither and by playing all parties against themselves, so she can be left alone to decide about her life. In the same year she did Great Balls of Fire, playing the thirteen-year-old bride of Jerry Lee Lewis.

In 1990, Winona played in another Burton project, Edward Scissorhands, alongside her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp. It is her only movie, other than 2002's Mr. Deeds, in which one can admire her natural blond hair, which she has dyed dark since childhood.

She withdrew from her role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part III, after feeling exhausted from recent roles — she finished two somewhat related movies Mermaids (film) (with Cher, Christina Ricci, Bob Hoskins and Michael Schoeffling) and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (with Jeff Daniels), both shot in 1990 and both stressing the motive of the ability of our own personal narrative changing our real life.

In 1991, she played a taxi driver who wants to become a mechanic (Night on Earth), against the forced repertoire of roles selected for women by gender prejudices.

In 1992, she starred in the dual roles of Dracula's reincarnated, love interest Mina Harker and Dracula's past lover Princess Elisabeta, in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a project she brought to director Francis Ford Coppola's attention.

The next year she appeared in The Age of Innocence (alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis), a film based on a novel by Edith Wharton and helmed by director Martin Scorsese, whom Ryder considers the best director. She plays a young woman, captured in plots within plots within plots of the society where every sentence pronounced has at least three different meanings. The constant merciless war of countless conspiring factions is mirrored in the scenery, full of symbols and ciphered messages passed by secret agents of love trying to tell truth while avoiding the insane rage of organised madness around them. Her role in this movie won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination.

Next she starred in How to Make an American Quilt (1995) - again the character is forced to choose between a will of the "quilting bee" and her desires, followed by Boys, (1996), again fighting for her self against the whole world, with love as her only true friend and guide. The movie also featured the motive of confusion between subjective and objective interpretations of perceived reality, later exploited in Lost Souls. She received yet another nomination in 1994 with Little Women, based on the classic novel of the same name.