Premiere, January 1995

Winona Ryder is being perfectly adorable. Four words! she signals. First word! Movie! She twinkles flirtatiously and bats her eyelashes, laces her fingers and rests her chin on them like a Precious Moments figurine. She poses for a moment -- then suddenly extends her arms and starts sashaying around. "Shy!" sqeuaks Eva, the nine-year-old daughter of Susan Sarandon, watching Ryder's every move. Wrong. "Dancer!" Wrong. "Pretty," guesses Sarandon. More, bigger, Ryder signs. "Beautiful!" Sarandon cries, getting involved. Close, so close, but shorter. "Beauty?" Sarandon guesses. "Beauty and the Beast!" Eva yells, ecstatic. Yes! ** It's a lighthearted interlude just after lunch on the Vancouver set of what will be the fourth movie adaptation of , Louisa May Alcott's novel for girls. The set is dominated by a New England house, surrounded by a complicated ersatz-nature arrangement that enables the house photogenic inhabitants to enjoy autumn from the kitchen window, winter from the parlor, and summer from around the corner. Sarandon is playing Marmee, the matriarch of Little Women's fictional March family. Ryder, naturally, is playing Jo -- the coolest March sister, the tomboy, the heroine.

Denise De Novi, Little Women's producer, loves to talk about Ryder and how fabulous she is in the movie. "Did you see Reality Bites?" Di Novi asks. "I think that's the first film where you really see how adorable Winona is. She's the most charming, funny, sweet person." Charming, funny, sweet -- and cute as a bunny too. Not exactly the obvious choice to play Jo, who's prickly, awkward, antisocial, and one of fiction's few pointedly unbeautiful heroines. Well, this is, after all, a Christmas movie. And Ryder is, after all, an actress.

Di Novi swears Ryder can handle the part. "She's actually more like Jo in real life than any other character she's played," she claims. "Winona may be little, but her personality is big." Ryder herself is positive she doesn't look too pretty. "I hardly wore any makeup at all!" she says earnestly. "And with my hair pulled back in a braid, I look very plain." Besides, Ryder's brand of sweetness is also Little Women's: She's got a childlike, just-milked-the-cows lilt that's perfect for the movie, if not for the part of Jo. The occasional "fuck" notwithstanding, Ryder usually talks like Cindy Brady, or the original Tiny Tim. "I've just had one of the greatest times I've ever had making a movie," she syas with a happy sigh, "because I really truly love everybody so much. I know it sounds cliche, but the girls really do feel like my sisters, you know?"

There are four sisters in Little Women, plus one mother and a (mostly absent) father. The six Marches are modeled on Louisa May Alcott's own family -- a fractious, eccentric, impoverished, pious group who lived in a number of places up and down the Eastern seaboard during the middle of the 19th century. Alcott's mother, Abby, came from an upper-class Boston family with a history of involvement in the antislavery movement. Louisa's father, Bronson, was part of the Emerson-Thoreau-Margaret Fuller transcendentalist circle in the 1830's and '40s. He became famous for his Socratic teaching method, which aimed to draw knowledge out of small children rather than put it in. Bronson's obsession with child development led him to do some dubious things in the service of truth. He allowed his daughter, Anna, when she was only a few months old, to twice put her hand in the flame of an oil lamp: the first time to show her it would hurt, the second to make sure she wouldn't forget. Later on, he convinced her that she should love him all the more for punishing her since punishment made her good, and he was so convincing that Anna took to beggingm "Father, punish! Father, punish!"

Louisa, the second Alcott daughter, wrote Little Women in 1868 under pressure from her publisher, who thought it would sell. "Mr N. wants a girls' story... so I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing," she wrote in her journal at the time. "Never liked girls or knew many except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." In the novel, Jo, based on Louisa herself, changes from an evil-tempered, bookish, loud, unladylike fifteen-year-old who wants deparately to be a famous author, to a gentle, happy, married mother of two who still wants to write but has realized that love is more important than ambition. The script brings the story up to date by highlighting its PC elements and, when these do not exist, by borrowing from the lives of the Alcotts. Robin Swicord, author of the screenplay, certainly didn't want to reproduce the medieval politics of the 1933 George Cukor Little Women (Katherine Hepburn's Jo is great, but she ends up ironing) or the glorifious Technicolor banality of the 1949 version (June Allyson, all smiles, plays Jo as Pollyanna). To Swicord's way of thinking, Little Women is about successful single motherhood and female artists coming of age, and so provides the ideal vehicle for a little covert validation. "I hope that young girls emerge from the movie feeling stronger and less like they live in a male-dominated world," she says. Not surprisingly, Swicord has jettisoned the book's Christian ambivalence toward artistic achievement: In the film, Jo's writing becomes central. (Swicord thinks the novel's ambivalence is Louisa May Alcotts's unconscious apology for her father, widely considered a failure and crackpot despite his famous friends.) And Swicord has thrown in many of the Alcott causes, absent from the book, for good political measure: the temperance and women's movemnets; the thwarted attempt to desegregate Bronson's school; even transcedentalism.

This last item is noteworthy because it is the utopian connection that makes Ryder not quite so unlikely a choice to play Jo as she would seem. As a kid, Ryder spent four years living on an electricity-free commune in Northern California that was in some respects a hippie version of Brook Farm, the trascendentalist settlement that Bronson Alcott helped found. She was raised, Alcott-style, to be free from convention and to believe, as Ryder puts it, that "whatever you do is okay unless you hurt somebody else." Ryder herself is unsure whether this or any other real-life likeness to Alcott or Jo helped her with the part. Mimesis is, of course, such a complicated business. "I've tried to have this conversation with other actors," she says. "Are we adding our own personalities to the characters or are we creating different personalities? Acting is so strange."

The commune experience has come in handy, though, in scenes involving candles. Ryder is accustomed to them, but noncommunnard Claire Danes was not, and managed to set her hair onfire. The crew, used to girly high spirits on the set, thought Danes's screams weren't serious and did nothing. Eventually Ryder leaped on top of the actress and put the fire out. "I guess Claire didn't realize that you have to hold candles away from your head," Ryder says.

Ryder was snagged for Little Women by Denise Di Novi; the two worked together on Heathers and Edward Scissorhands. Di Novi got involved with the movie at the behest of Amy Pascal, then an executive vice-president of production at Columbia. Pascal rang up Di Novi and asked if she'd be interested in working on the project; Di Novi said she would die to. "And I called Winona." Di Novi recalls, "because we had talked about how much we both loved the book on the set of Heathers, and I said, 'You won't believe this but we can do Little Women!' And of course she jumped and said she'd love to do it."

Di Novi is sitting in the sparsely furnished office from which she is running the movie. The room's only design element is a shelf-long row of Evian bottles. As she talks, Di Novi reaches for one of these and, Player-like, uses it to water a bunch of flowers. "I found Little Women a very comforting book as a kid," Di Novi says, "because Jo wasn't like all those other girl heroines -- really pretty and popular and everything. I didn't feel inadequate when I read about Jo. I feel bad for teenagers nowadays, reading Danille Steele and Judth Krantz novels -- I've read a couple of then and they make me feel like a shlump."

Di Novi is anxious to convey that Little Women is still rather radical, even in the '90s. "It's so important that Jo doesn't marry Laurie, the beautiful rich guy," she says. "I don't want to sound like a spoilsport, but I do think on a deep psychic level it's very harmful for both men and women to think there's this perfect 10 out there for them." No, she concedes, Gabriel Byrne, who player Professor Bhaer -- the plain, donnish, German whom Jo does marry -- is not exactly Frankenstein's monster. "I don't think you have to marry an ugly guy to be a feminist or something," she begins slowly, venturing with care into this potential contradiction. "But Jo chooses her soul mate based on an intellectual, emotional, connection, not superficial, romantic, love-at-first-sight things or sexual chemistry. Anyway, Gabriel Byrne is handsome, but he's not Richard Gere. He's older, and kind of slobby -- not your traditional hero."

Looking for an actress to play Marmee, Di Novi decided she wanted someone "earthy and warm and sensual" -- and who better than Susan Sarandon? Like Ryder, Sarandon can identify with an aspect of the Alcott family: not the commune aspect, but the religious-ethical one. Sarandon grew up in a strict Catholic family, the eldest of nine, and as a child aspired to a career as a saint. She is famously political, and at the 1993 Academy Awards she took the opportunity to make a speech about the plight of AIDS-infected Haitian refugee that was a real downer and annoyed a lot of people and was exactly what Marmee or Bronson Alcott would have said under similar circumstances. Sarandon is quick to point out, however, that there is all the difference in the world between Catholics and transcendentalists. "The Catholic Church is so misogynist, and about punishing yourself and original sin and all those doctrines that make you apologize from the day you're born," she says. "The Alcotts were closer to being Quakers, and the Quaker philosophy is community service and being a good person."

Sarandon just can't get over how great Marmee is, and what a wonderful model she makes for mothers today. So is Marmee perfect? This stops Sarandon for a second, presumably because she knows perfect is bad. "I hope she's not perfect, or she would be so unreal," she says. "I'm sure there's lots of thing wrong with her. She's a woman in struggle, as every real person is." Is there anything about Marmee she does not identify with? "The corset and the buttpad and the hairdo I definitely don't," Sarandon says grimly. "And I don't think Marmee cared what people thought of her. Also, she put up with a lot more from her husband than I would have. Under a philosophical banner, he was pretty abusive. He practically starve and froze those girls to death."

Corsets, buttpads, abusive husbands... Little Women -- as-feminist-morality-tale was definitely there to be made, but Gillian Armstrong, the movie's director, didn't want to make it. Unexpectedly, the Australian director of My Brilliant Career (the story of a woman who flees romance to follow her muse) and the Smokes and Lollies documnetary series (which follows a group of girls through adolescence and early adulthood) hates the idea that she might be thought of as a woman filmmaker. "I consider myself a film director and an artist," Armstrong says, annoyed by the suggestion that Little Women might be a feminist movie. "Of course I believe in women's rights, and of course I wouldn't do a film that was sexist, but that doesn't mean I want to make commercials for the women's movement. Besides, I've always tought that the best way to carry a message is with a bit of entertainment."

The bit of entertainment Armstrong has been trying for is comedy. "The thing we're stressing is the humor," she says. "I hope it's not hokey." This is a tall order. Little Women the Chrsitmas movies... well, one can only imagine. "I don't think there are a lot of belly laughs," Sarandon says diplomatically, "but Marmee has a certain sense of irony."

"The humor is more in the expressions on our faces," Ryder explains when asked the same question. "The movie is not that kind of roll-around-laughing funny, but it's really real."

Making Little Women has been something pf an experiment for Armstrong -- the last time she worked in Hollywood the experience was a disaster: Her film, Fires Within was recut by MGM despite her protests, to the point at which she no longer fely any connection to it, and then was barely released. But Armstrong seems to be ready to forgive and get paid American wages again. "It's the old Hollywood story," she says philosophically. "It's part of the game: They put up the money and then they tell the director who's made them a $100 million success that she doesn't have the final cut. It's the luck of the draw, really."

This time, just to be safe, Armstrong took the footage home and edited it in Australia. And, according to Ryder at least, it shows. "Gillian is such a great director," Ryder says. "She's got a real point of view I thinl Little Women is going to be a classic movie because it's really heavy and really intelligent and in a way it's a real art movie too -- like it'll appeal to the people who drink cappuccinos in the lobby. you know?"

Vogue, December 1996

Ryder likes to talk. "I'm a rambler," she admits wryly, and as we cruise toward Wilshire Boulevard, her conversation leapfrogs from topic to topic. How she "worships" Gwyneth Paltrow. How Al Pacino wooed her for Looking for Richard (she does a hilarious Godfather rasp). How she hopes to make a sequel to Heathers -- "because there are still Heathers everywhere."

Chatting away, she drives like she's auditioning for the remake of Annie Hall. Turning left, she cuts off a driver who begins leaning on his horn. "That's so-o unfair," Ryder moans. "I didn't do anything wrong. Unsettled by his furious honking, she promptly runs a red light. Moments later her cellular phone rings, and she can't figure out where it is - in a panic, she starts swatting at the dashboard as if she's trying to kill a bee. When we finally reach the safe haven of valet parking, only slightly frazzled by the trip, she gives me a dazzling grin: "We made it."

Ever since 1989's Heathers, Ryder has had a curious pull on moviegoers: She's glamorous enough to be an ideal, yet ordinary enough to seem within reach. As the brainy ingenue with a streak of rebellion, the 25-year-old actress has also become a nineties touchstone. There's a Bay Area punk-pop band called the Wynona Riders. In Primary Colors, a James Carvilielike politico calls his sexy young campaign workers "Winonas." Her fans have created more than eight different Winona Web sites on the Internet, one devoted to answering frequently asked questions about her family, her films, and the possibility of downloading dirty pictures. (She winces. "I don't do nudity ever")

Noni, as friends call her, is one of Hollywood's most literate young stars, and Quentin Tarantino aside, the one most in love with the movies. "I see everything," she says - and means it. She's a flurry of enthusiasms. In the course of a brief conversation, she'll do a ten-minute riff on Bastard Out of Carolina, discuss Judy Davis's "amazmg" performance in a 'dreadful" movie she saw on cable at 4:00 A.M., and rave up Bandit Queen, an Indian film about a downtrodden village girl who becomes a leader of the dispossessed. Given the least prompting, she'll quote whole scenes from Albert Brooks's Modern Romance, which she and her family watch over and over.

Today, she's ecstatic about her new film, The Crucible, an adaptation of Arthur Miller's play about mass hysteria (and McCarthyism) set during the Salem witch trials of 1692. Ryder stars as Abigail Williams, a young Puritan woman who's spurned by her married lover (Daniel Day-Lewis) and begins accusing innocent people of sorcery. For the first time, Ryder plays the bad guy. And she does it with such demonic, hollow-eyed fierceness that many in Hollywood are already taking an Oscar nomination for granted. The Crucible could do for Ryder what Fatal Attraction did for Glenn Close: get her out of the nice-girl ghetto.

Ryder is eager for such a litberation, both on-screen and off-.

"When I was younger," she says, "every time I'd open my mouth on the set, people would go, 'Isn't that cute? Winona has her littie ideas. Isn't that cute?' Well, I'm not the youngest person on the set anymore."

The Crucible is only one step in Ryder's ambitious plan to be a grown-up on film. In Alien: Resurrection, she'll try something even more audacious -- playing an action hero. With her hair cropped short for the film, she stili looks more like the eternal waif than the toughest chick in outer space.

Ryder's not daunted. Slim as filigree, she's gone on a high-powered exercise regimen to prepare for slaughtering space monsters alongside Sigourney Weaver, who is reprising the character of Ripley. "I'm training six hours a day, six days a week," Ryder says, "because I don't want to be the only one gasping on the starship. It's exhausting, but it also helps me to vent - especially the martial-arts stuff. My instructor says I'm a natural." She gives a proud smile. "It's all very technical, you know. Block, jab,jab, hook, jab, jab, block - pow! I love it. "When they first mentioned doing the movie, I almost jumped out of my seat," she says. "You see, my whole family is obsessed with Alien. My brother Jubal runs a comicbook store, and one wall is covered with Alien paraphernalia. I must have been about nine when I saw the original because we were still living on the commune. And I wanted to be Ripley. She was the first woman action hero, and she's still one of the greatest women's roles. I had to do it."

Although not yet completely comfortable with starring in a special-effects extravaganza - "I don't think of it as an action movie," she says hopefuly - Ryder is thrilled to have landed the role. Having spent years playing sedentary young women who don't know their own hearts, she's relishing the chance to cut loose.

She fixes me with those dark eyes. "Playing cute and confused doesn't interest me anymore," she says. "I wanted to be an actress ever since I was a girl." If this sounds strange, it's because she became an actress when she was a girl. At thirteen, she went straight from a San Francisco acting class t o a role in the Hollywood film Lucas. Within five years - the time it took to make Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Edward Scissorhands - she'd become the leading actress of her generation. While such peers as Julia Roberts have been steamrollered by their stardom, Ryder has used her clout to work with the best filmmakers.

Ryder possesses a natural winsomeness, a virtue that can easily turn wan in films (like Reality Bites) that rely on it too much. She's best when her characters have a few sharp edges. Her most memorable roles, in Heathers and The Age of Innocence, are sneakily jagged, showcasing her ability to perform on more than one level. Heathers's Veronica must juggle two distinct kinds of madness - a Darwinian high school hierarchy that glorifies cheerleaders and a boyfriend who attacks it with gleeful murder. Similarly, May Welland in The Age of Innocence must wear the placid veneer of the well-bred social butterfly while revealing, in the quietly lethal climax with her husband, a territorial sense worthy of a barracuda.

In The Crucible Ryder reachs a new level of emotional rawness. As the hysterical Abigail WIlliams, bent on avenging her wronged innocence, she bristles with the fury of one goaded by the demons of eroticism and madness. ("People keep saying Abigail's a bitch," grumbles Ryder, irked that anyone would view the character so shallowly. "But she's also a victim. I feel for her.") It's her most adult performance - and her most sexual.

Some of that role's sexual charge carries over into her description of acting with Daniel Day-Lewis.

"I'm simply besotted with him," she says, eyes glittering, her voice ardent. "He's so good he forces you to give the best performance. You want to please him. It's almost like a supernatural experience: Your mind cannot leave a scene when you're with him. It's like he has you by the throat, and you give everything to him because he deserves it."

Of course, succeeding as a movie star has as much to do with good instincts as it does with acting.

"Winona's having such a good career," says The Crucible's director, Nicholas Hytner, "because she never worries about her career. She does what interests her rather than what looks like just another step on the Hollywood chessboard."

"When I was offered Heathers," she remembers, "my agent at the time got on her knees, literally, and sald, 'Please don't do this movie. I promise you if you do this movie you will never work again.'

"I said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm gonna do it, and I don't care if it ever comes out.' And I never looked back." She gives a tiny glint of self-satisfaction, then adds, "I was fifteen-and-a-half at the time."

But being a teenage movie star is not without its costs. Ryder pulled out of The Godfather, Part III at the last minute, blaming a "respiratory infection" that many thought a pretext for self-indulgence or nervous collapse. A few years later, during her long breakup from Johnny Depp (and his WINONA FOREVER tattoo), she suffered through what she calls "a very dark time." She smoked heavily, bit her nails to the nub. She suffered grievous bouts of insomnia, followed by a reliance on the sleeping pills prescribed to battle it.

When Ryder is in a good mood, it's easy to forget her abiding sense of melancholy. Her obsessions run to the grim. She devours movies about child abuse and has optioned books like Susanna Kaysen's madhouse memoir, Girl Interrupted.

At her suggestion, we meet one morning at L.A.'s Museum of Tolerance, which is filled with genocide exhibitions and interactive warnings against bigotry.

"I lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust," she says simply, and her eyelids do that little dance they do whenever she's dealing with an unsettling subject. "What scares me the most about it is the separation. Even more than the deaths, it's families being separated."

Ryder feels peculiarly at home in places like this, but today a tour group begins demanding autographs. She politely signs and signs - who could turn down anyone in a museum devoted to tolerance? - but eventually the fans' rude insistence forces us to flee.

"Was I mean?" she asks in the elevator. "I was trying to be nice, but I feel like I was so-o mean.

There's no reassuring her.

"I'm insecure about everything," she says, laughing even about worrying too much. "I get this way when I'm not working. I have too much time to think about myself."

Such self-absorption is hardly surprising: Her entire adult life has been spent answering (and dodging) questions about her personal life - about her long relationships with Johnny Depp ("First love is amazing and devastating" is her single, oblique comment) and Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum. Although they recently split, she calls Pirner "the best person I've ever met.

"Being with Johnny Depp broke me in. We couldn't go a week without reading something that either wasn't true or was only half true, or was taken out of context. I wouldn't want to go through that again. Looking back, I can see that it did affect our relationship. I was at an age when I was really insecure." She sips her Evian. "But in retrospect, I'm grateful for the experience. By the time I was 21, nothing could faze me."

Maybe not, but a few days later, when talk of a romance with the The X-Files's David Duchovny spread from the tabloids to TV Guide, Ryder quickly issued a public denial.

"Somehow the rumor got started," she tells me over the phone, "and it was like a hurricane hit. I just wanted to nip it in the bud. We went out a few times, but that's all there is. I'm not involved with anyone. Period."

"Noni's a very nice person," says a young actress who knows her. "But it has to have been hard for her because she's never had a normal life. Like when somebody suggests something ordinary, like 'Let's have a barbecue,' she gets kind of excited because for her that's something really exotic. If it wasn't for having a cool family, she'd probably have gone crazy by now."

Because Ryder's parents, Michael and Cindy Horowitz, were deeply involved in the counterculture, much has been written of her "hippie" upbringing. But these days, the Horowitz kids appear to lead strikingly conservative lives - "Round people have square babies," Ryder jokes. She talks constantly about her parents and siblings (sister Sunyata, brothers Jubal and Yuri). They are her refuge, her balm. She bought a house in San Francisco partly because her lower Manhattan apartment was too far from Petaluma, where her parents live.

Ryder says she'd like a family of her own someday, but at the moment she's too busy making movies and enjoying the perks ofstardorM - which include scoring the best seats when her favorite rocker, Paul Westerberg, plays the Troubadour, and hanging out with Gwyneth, Mira, and Ashley at last fall's big New York City bash for Giorgio Armani.

Although she likes to play down her obvious interest in fashion, Ryder is widely admired in Hollywood for her old-style sense of glamour; people still hail the triumphant audacity of the vintage fringed dress she wore to the 1994 Academy Awards.

"Normally, I dress like this, " she says, gesturing down at the black cutoffs and sleeveless T-Shirt that display the merest hint of the new musculature produced by all those hours in the gym. "But when I go out, I like real simpIe, beautiful clothes - almost boyish." These days she's particularly fond of Prada, Anna Molinari, and Jil Sanden.

The next afternoon, we're sitting in Ryder's Beverly Hills house, a small Spanish number whose downstairs is dominated by a big-screen TV and a poster of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. It's 45 minutes until her next six-hour stint at the gym, and she's talking about identity. When she was younger, she would often be ambushed by pain and depression because, she says, "I didn't know who I was when I wasn't acting." But entering her second decade as a screen actress, Ryder has a much stronger idea of herself. She feels she took another step forward earlier this year in dealing with the death of her godfather Timothy Leary.

"I was with Tim when he died," she says, her voice growing soft. "He was smiling, and after he died, they couldn't push his smile down. You know, I saw him a lot in the last few weeks of his life, and got to hold his body, which was an amazing experience and not as morbid as I anticipated. Watching him made me not so afraid of death.