Lost girl's resurrection

Winona Ryder as Amanda Grayson (Spock's mother) in Star Trek. Photo / Supplied

In the opinion of Winona Ryder's father, Michael Horowitz, the teenage Winona and her boyfriend Johnny Depp were once "the hottest couple in the United States".

During the 1980s and early 1990s Ryder's elfin face was everywhere and her unconventional films were eagerly awaited by critics and fans. A star since the age of 17 for her performances in cult films Heathers and Beetlejuice, she had been quickly acclaimed as the most promising, most beautiful and most fashionable star of her generation - the generation, that is, that had become known as "X".

Then came a series of bad creative decisions - or perhaps just bad luck - which gradually began to edge Ryder deeper into a kind of Hollywood twilight. Stories about her hell-raising friends and associates culminated in the dramatic news eight years ago that the star had been arrested on charges related to a US$5000 shoplifting incident at Saks Fifth Avenue's Beverly Hills branch.

Ryder's humiliation and her subsequent trial and conviction were eventually followed by 500 hours of community service, before the actress deliberately dropped out of sight, quitting Los Angeles to live more quietly in her childhood home of San Francisco. It was a place where she had always fitted in. "I'm San Franciscan to the bone," she said recently.

Now, with a succession of new films opening over the next few months, Ryder is back, riding high, and happy to subject herself once more to the critical gaze of her public. Audiences can see her now in the remake of Star Trek, and then later this year in a trio of rather more typically Ryder-esque independent and literary offerings, including an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' novel The Informers and a film called The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, written and directed by Rebecca Miller, daughter of the the late playwright Arthur Miller.

In Star Trek, Ryder appears alongside a youthful Spock and Captain Kirk, played by Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine, and boldly goes into camp, big-budget, cinematic territory. Tellingly, JJ Abrams' colourful treatment of the early lives of the crew of the Starship Enterprise is being accompanied by the release of Barbie "collectors' edition" dolls of the central characters from toy company Mattel.

Aside from this space journey into mainstream entertainment, though, Ryder is promising to stick to her trademark choice of unusual, risky and low-budget films. She has always been choosy about her work, but she has also missed out on a number of high-profiles roles through sheer misfortune, falling ill on the set of Godfather III to be replaced by the director's daughter, Sofia Coppola, and reportedly losing the lead role in Shakespeare in Love to her former room-mate, Gwyneth Paltrow. For British film critic Philip French, however, Ryder's many fine performances have stood the test of time. "She was quite exceptionally good in some of her early films and wonderfully moving in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, as well, which in many ways was the best film that Merchant Ivory [productions] never made," he says.

French sees Ryder as having been dangerously over-exposed in her early career. "She is a victim of the post-studio system in Hollywood," he suggests. "In the old days she would have been signed up with a big studio on a long contract and they would have looked after her and protected her from the press." Among Ryder's most memorable successes, the critic lists her portrayal of Jo March in the third "and best" adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and her performance in Great Balls of Fire!, playing Jerry Lee Lewis' under-age bride.

On the downside though, Ryder did appear in the 2002 version of Mr Deeds, which French regards as "a terrible film". ("Remakes are often bad, but this one was particularly bad.") If Ryder's artistic rehabilitation works out, she will have re-emerged at the age of 37 as one of the most impressive veterans of a 1980s Hollywood bratpack scene that has seen many casualties. An emblem of troubled, talented youth, Ryder was a sort of female equivalent of River Phoenix.

She, however, has survived. "She was shaping up in the 1990s to be a successor to Natalie Wood," suggests French. "After Wood's early death she was reassessed as an extremely fine actress. Like Ryder, Wood, who also played vulnerable, petite brunettes, did far too much work early in her career." While Ryder has kept the fresh looks of an ingenue, the mythology that cloaks her is large enough for a star twice her age. Among the Winona tidbits treasured by her fans are the facts that she suffers from both insomnia and aquaphobia, that she really has blond hair, that her godfather was drugs evangelist Timothy Leary, that her brother Uri was named after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, that her father knew Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and that Johnny Depp had to have his tattoo altered from "Winona Forever" to "Wino Forever" when they split up.

Most recently, the Hollywood chatrooms have buzzed with speculation that Ryder is the mystery "frenemy", or false friend, described as "venomous and dangerous" by her former best buddy, Gwyneth Paltrow, in a bulletin on the star's newsletter. So far, so gothic. But when it comes to the issue of Ryder's recent mental health crisis and her criminal conviction, the picture gets darker still.

Speaking to Vogue last year, the actress explained that her shoplifting bout had followed a period of addiction to painkillers. "Have you ever taken painkillers?" she asked. "It isn't a reckless [state], like you're out of your head. It's just confusion. I wonder if that hadn't been going on if I would have done things differently. I can't or won't ever know. But I remember being really confused." Stunned and fearful, Ryder reacted to the furore surrounding her arrest by staying away from the world and limiting her film work for many months. "I just sat there. I never said a word. I didn't release a statement. I didn't do anything. I just waited for it to be over," she has said.

A key part of the actress' long rehabilitation process, strategic or otherwise, was a series of comic outings, including appearances in the satirical show Saturday Night Live and in the sitcom Friends. This route has been tried and tested by other disgraced stars, such as former teen heart-throb Rob Lowe, who wisely took a part in Mike Myers' hit film Wayne's World after his career had been threatened by a sex scandal and a stint in rehab. "You can get back into the public's favour, although 'redemption' may be too strong a word for it, by showing you have a sense of humour and are in control of your life again," notes French.

Ryder says she has no abiding sense of guilt about her crime because her shoplifting did not physically hurt anybody. Now a keen collector of Hollywood ephemera, she is the proud owner of the blouse Olivia de Havilland wore in Gone With the Wind, the dress Claudette Colbert wore in It Happened One Night, and the dress Leslie Caron wore in An American in Paris. She is also obsessive about music, playing the 12 guitars that hang up in her home alongside posters of the Clash, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen. Ryder also owns almost every edition of her favourite book, JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Ryder, so long a symbol of adolescent turmoil, first in Heathers and then as Cher's daughter in Mermaids, has now graduated to playing the part of a parent.

In Star Trek, she plays the human mother of the half-Vulcan Spock, but Ryder seems to be adapting to the ageing process with better grace than some Hollywood stars. "It's strange how birthdays are treated so funereally out here," she has said, adding that she disapproves of Botox but might use eye cream. Still close to her father, a dealer in rare books, she has never rejected the subversive ethos of her parents and says the phrase "question authority", coined in the 1960s by her godfather, Leary, is still one of her favourites.

Fittingly, her next role will see her playing a New York Times investigative reporter who exposes a people-trafficking ring based in Russia in writer/director Fiona McKenzie's new thriller, Alpha Numeric.

* Star Trek is in cinemas now.

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