Marie Claire, January 1998

GP: Then what?
WR: I spend the rest of the morning making and returning phone calls and taking care of various business things. If I'm in L.A., sometimes I will take a long walk behind my house-- either in the morning to get going or in the evening to relax and wind down. At some point, my assistant, Sandra, comes over to help me with calls and sorting out scripts, and anything organizational. Depending on the day, I either have lunch with friends or attend business meetings.

GP: Then you come back home and hove to deal with 75 messages from all your suitors.
WR: Exactly! And then in the latter part of the afternoon, I'll read a book or a script -- or I'll go shopping.

GP: With me! And apart from the infamous trips to Fred Segal, you do a lot of charity work, which is something I don't think many people realize about you. You made a tremendous effort to help Polly Klaas and her family when she was missing, and I know you are currendy organizing a benefit; tell me about it.
WR: It's an event to raise money for a clinic that my mother runs in Haight-Ashhury in San Francisco. It is the only clinic that does not turn anyone away -- regardless of lack of money or insurance. Its patients mostly consist of young people with HIV, and the homeless. It is a wonderful and very human place that relies largely on private donations. I am organizing the benefit to take place on January 31, and I'm working to promote the event and to encourage people to donate and get involved.

GP: Tell me more about your life in San Francisco. What do you like to do on a typical day?
WR: My brother has a comic book store and I usually go there and work behind the register for a couple of hours, which is fun. Then I'll go out with friends or hangout with my family.

GP: You are very close to your family, aren't you?
WR: I'm extremely close to them. Whenever I'm in San Francisco, we'll all have dinner together every night. I spend most of my time with them when I'm there. It is very centering and comforting; they are amazing people.

GP: I know. That's wonderful. what do you do in the evenings when you are in Los Angeles?
WR: I order in food and rent Prime Suspect.

GP: The British television series?
WR: Yeah, or another show called Cracker.

GP: It's great to cuddle in like that in L.A. and not go out and have to interface with the Angelenos.
WR: L.A. is all about staying in and ordering food. If you go out, it's to the Virgin Megastore or to a movie.

GP: G.I.Jane far the third time?
WR: Totally.

GP: And when in New York?
WR: I hang out with you and tell you all of my problems.

GP: You don't have any problems. Except that you have to listen to all of my problems, that's your problem.
WR: Right.

GP: And then you go to the record store and I make you buy the Spice Girls CD and pretend that you are buying it for yourself.
WR: Actually, I told the guy at the counter that I was buying it for my niece.

GP: And you don't even have a niece, but thank you for protecting me.
WR: What are friends for? I would never expose you as a Spice Girls fan.

GP: I just exposed myself. So, where are your favorite places to go when you're in New York?
WR: I like to take walks. I like to hear music and go to museums. I go to my favorite restaurant near my house. They have delicious grilled chicken with homemade biscuits.

GP: And a mean cosmopolitan. Do you ever go to premieres or anything like that?
WR: I'll go to a premiere if a friend has worked on the film and I want to support them. And I go to my own because they make you.

GP: The sure do.
WR: But you want to if you're proud of the movie you're in.

GP: I'll be your date to Alien Resurrection if you don't have a proper one.
WR: Vice versa for Sliding Doors.

GP: what do you do at the end of the day to relax?
WR: I listen to music, read or play drums. I have a drum set that's very Drummer Girl.

GP: You are Watts from Some Kind ofWonderful.
WR: I auditioned for that part when I was 12. I love to play drums. I played "Eye of the Tiger" for my eighth grade talent show.

GP: I would love to have that on video. How much would I get from Hard Copy for that? Do you know what film you're going to do next?
WR: I'm deciding that now.

GP: One of the things I admire most about you is the choices that you make. Every film you do is good, in that even if the final film isn't brilliant, there is a very good artistic reason behind it. You make really interesting films. And you don't sell out. What do you look for when choosing?
WR: A well-written script is the most important thing. Sometimes you get in trouble if you commit to a good idea that isn't on paper yet. But it is all a good learning process.

GP: And you are still so young.
WR: As opposed to you?

GP: We have a lot ahead of us. OK, we got off track. what do you do at the very end of the day?
WR: Put on a comfortable pair of pajamas, have a cup of hot tea with you and reach for the remote control.

Stars & Stripes, 1 February 1998

At 26, Winona Ryder has already logged more movies than her flashy contemporaries and has been generously praised for most of her work. But the staggering prominence that has dogged them has somehow only brushed her.

"I wouldn't want to be a big movie star," she says, shrugging her small shoulders "I think my life would be incredibly complicated if I was."

The star of movies like Little Women, The Crucible and the new Alien Resurrection has been acting since she was 13. Those experiences (and an impressive dose of uncommon common sense) have given her a wisdom beyond her years.

"Personally I think I'd be very unhappy (if I were a star) I probably wouldn't trust a lot of people. I would hate people prying into my personal life. That happens to me to a certain extent, too. But the big star, that happens to them every day. Every move they make is documented. With me, when I get photographed is when I go to a premiere. Occasionally when I'm walking down the street. I don't mind being photographed when I'm prepared for it. Those people are photographed when they're not prepared for it."

She recalls lurid nude tabloid shots of Pitt and his former girlfriend, Paltrow, when they were sunbathing on a holiday.

"They were on a very, very private vacation and they were photographed naked because he's a huge movie star, and that's disgusting and just terrible," she says, shaking her head and folding her arms across her chest.

"I don't mean to sound conceited, but when people talk about me, they talk about my work or my movies or that I'm an actress. They don't talk about my personal life so much: because I don't have a very exciting one."

Excitement is in the eye of the beholder. While sees her existence as run-of-the-mill, it has been anything but.

Ryder's parents were what she calls "hippies." She spent the erst few years of her life in Chile while her parents leaved with Chilean revolutionaries. She lived part of the time in a commune, and her family consorted with people like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, who was her godfather. She lived for most of her youth in Petaluma, Calif., where people remember her as slightly unusual.

She enjoyed a romance with actor Johnny Depp and continued a fluctuating liaison with Soul Asylum singer Dave Pirner. Occasionally she, too, has found herself the subject of 76-point headlines.

But that seems to have abated.

She's always been close to her brother and half-brother and sister. Now she lives in San Francisco, where her brother runs a comic book store.

And it was her brother who came to her rescue when one of her adoring fans became all too ardent.

"A few years ago we went to a neighborhood bar on New Year's Eve and a guy came up and grabbed me and started to kiss me. I freaked out. And my brother pulled him off of me. What was so strange, he felt that since he'd grown up watching me on screen he thought he could do that. I think he was drunk, but it really shook me up."

In spite of her 22 movies, there's still an innocent winsomeness about Ryder that often escapes actors who have spent their puberty on sound-stages and in unforgiving close-ups.

She's girlishly excited about playing a crew member in the fourth Alien movie. Like a fan herself, she enthuses, "I'm a science fiction freak. That's something nobody knows about me. I remember I saw the first Alien when I was about 8 or 9. I remember we sat through it twice. My parents left during the chest-burster scene. We were in this small town (Ukiah, Calif.) and they couldn't handle it and all the kids stayed."

After the film, she and her siblings hid while the cleaning crew dusted out the theater. "And we came back and sat through it a second time. I went back about 15 times. I was obsessed because it was the first time I'd ever seen a woman survive at the end of those kinds of movies. It was the first female survivor heroine in a science fiction action movie ever."

She was such a devotee that it came as a complete surprise when she was offered the role in Alien Resurrection.

She recalls a couple of years ago when she was asked to meet with two of the honchos at 20th Century Fox. "They said, 'Would you consider doing science fiction?' I said I'd love to but the only way I'd do it was if it was on the lines of Alien. I said, 'The series is over, so I guess that's impossible.' They started laughing. They said they were actually bringing it back."

Ryder, who has learned to be cautious about what she does, impulsively agreed to do it.

"I said, 'Well, it'll probably be really cheesy but I'll do it anyway.' It's the first time I ever committed to doing anything without reading it."

Ryder was a fan from way back. A poster from the movie still decorates the wall of the room in her parents' house where she grew up.

"I said, I'll do it if I have to die in the first scene. I want to tell my brothers I was in an Alien movie.'"

Though she harbors passions other than acting, she's not good at any of them, she says.

"Acting is something I think I HAVE to do," she nods. "In Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke, there is a chapter where he talks about writing. He say's, 'If you have to write, then write, if your life depends on it. If you have to think about it, then don't do it.'

"That's how acting is with me, I have to do it I HAVE to. I feel like my life depends on it. It's my passion. It's what I crave. I don't think I could live without it."
 

Three pictures with following captions:

Winona Ryder portrays Abigail William, whose cries of witchcraft lead to the destruction of an entire village in The Crucible.

In Alien Resurrection, Ryder plays smuggler Annalee Call, who is tested by Sigourney Weaver's Ripley at their first meeting.