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Winona Ryder is 17 and has Hollywood at her feet. American critics agreed that her performance as Jerry Lee Lewis’s child bride was the best thing about Great Balls Of Fire, while Heathers has already become a cult film. British audiences get their chance to judge this month, but Winona has more important things than stardom on her mind: after finishing her next film, she will be giving it all up for university …

The movie’s most delicate accomplishment is its funny, sympathetic depiction of Lewis’s love affair with the schoolgirl Myra (on whose memoirs the film is based). Winona Ryder again proves herself the most gifted and endearing teen actress around. She plays off Quaid’s manic romantic assault with breathtaking spontaneity, her fresh, wide-eyed face running the scale of adolescent emotions, from glazed puppy love to pop-eyed bewilderment.

Winona Ryder may be only 17, but she has her mind made up about a lot of things. “Boys are more susceptible to seduction,” she pronounces when asked about the perils of teen stardom. “They’re wimps when it comes to that kind of stuff. They want it all, all of a sudden.”

Ryder, who has made six films since becoming an actress four years ago, says she is “taking things slowly, thinking the same way I thought a couple of years before. But boys don’t believe in gradual anything. A lot of them are clueless, the way they don’t think it could ever vanish once they have it all. They think they’ll stay hot forever.”

The Great Balls of Fire set sits in the Cook Convention Centre in Memphis like a giant, 50s-style doll’s house waiting foe Barbie and Ken to arrive. Everything in it, from the rugs to the curtains to the wallpaper to the upholstery to the tschotchkes (which in this part of the world are probably called gewgaws), is water-melon pink or mint-julep green or covered with pictures of poodles. We’re talking serious retro; this is the stuff 1980s diners and MTV videos are made of. This is the house where Jerry Lee Lewis and Myra, his 13-year-old child bride, live.

Diminutive Winona Ryder, with her innocent brown eyes, may have one of the summer’s most dicey roles – playing Jerry Lee Lewis’ 13-year-old cousin and bride. Even though she’s all of 17, she worried about her love-making scenes with 34-year-old leading man Dennis Quaid.

“I look about 11 years old,” she says. “My hair’s back in a ponytail and I’m wearing these little Peter Pan-collar things. I was really concerned that people were going to see it and go, ‘This is so perverted – 34 and 17.’

Riding shotgun, Winona Ryder kicked up her feet on the dashboard and pumped up the volume on KROQ-FM, ebulliently crooning to the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl.” It was time for her favorite pursuit – exploring abandoned houses.

“Quick – turn right,” she said abruptly as the car approached Sunset and Doheny, bumping along in heavy evening traffic. “It should be around here somewhere. The stories about this house sound incredible. I hear it’s a great spooky old place.”

Winona Ryder is doing something totally illegal. The sunny, dark-haired actress is blithelt motoring around Los Angeles in her friend’s rental car — and, at age seventeen, she’s too young to drive it. It’s early March, only three weeks since Ryder moved out of her parents’ house in Petaluma, California, and her own car is still up there, along with her collages, her bible — The Catcher in the Rye — her vast collection of handbags, socks, charm bracelets, Barbie dolls, Twilight Zone and Monty Python tapes. Oh, and the screenplay she wrote and sold. So just by driving to the mall, she’s flirting with danger.