WINONA ONLINE News Library

SOMETIMES A GIRL just needs to find the right guy. And Lord knows, Winona Ryder had been looking. For four years, the woman who always seems to snare America’s favorite man had been coming up empty. A lunch here, a conference call there, a meeting in between, and no one - not one single person - really got what she was after.

Even those of us who aren’t card-carrying members of Generation X can’t help but feel as if we’ve grown up with Winona Ryder. We’ve watched her battle high school bullies in Heathers, write her grad school thesis in How to Make an American Quilt and enter the working world in Reality Bites. She continued her transition to more adult roles in Autumn in New York and Lost Souls. She led us into new territory with her film Girl, Interrupted, which is based on Susanna Kaysen’s bold and candid memoir of her stay in a psychiatric ward.

In ‘Girl, Interrupted,’ Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie commit themselves to a different kind of chick flick - the true story of a young woman’s coming-of-age in a mental hospital.

She was suppose to be dead, this young actress hanging - wrists slashed, eyes open - in a bathroom in Pennsylvania. Though she’d been harnessed in that uncomfortable position for some time, she had a bigger problem: Winona Ryder, acting opposite her in this scene, was too convincing. Every time Ryder came into the bathroom and discovered, to her horror, her beloved friend hanging, the dead girl couldn’t help but cry.

Winona Ryder finds her richest role to date as the tortured, troubled heroine of Girl, Interrupted–a character, reports Jonathan Van Meter, that she understands all too well. Photographed by Steven Meisel.