The Guardian has published an article with some insights of Winona’s career and, as the article stated, why Hollywood wouldn’t let her grown up.
Words by Soraya Roberts
Winona Ryder first became a mother on film when she was 36. In 2007, she was hired by Star Trek reboot director JJ Abrams to play Spock’s mum. It was a cameo and only a handful of lines – basically amounting to her being a proud mother – before she fell off a cliff. Abrams had chosen Ryder as an homage to Richard Donner’s Superman, in which the supporting roles were also filled with known faces. “I thought it would be great to have an actress who people would recognise,” Abrams said at the time. And they did, only this was an actress they recognised for her adolescence, not her adulthood.
Now aged 45, icon of youth or not, Ryder is an undeniable adult and adulthood for women means motherhood. She has played a mother three more times on screen and each time it has been a variation on an age-old Hollywood theme.
Before this era of her working life the last major starring role of Ryder’s film career was Girl, Interrupted in 1999, when she was 28 playing 18. “I went from weirdo teenager to pixie waif to them not knowing what the hell to do with me,” she told the New York Times last year. Part of it was her advancing age – Hollywood had locked her in as an ingenue, but she was no longer young enough to play one – though it was also the public’s perception of her that had changed.