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WINONA RYDER IS AMUSED. 'Did you hear why we didn't have the royal premiere?' she says, arching her perfect eyebrows. 'The Queen viewed the movie, and nixed it.' She is three weeks into filming her next film, Alien: Resurrection with Sigourney Weaver, but it is The Crucible that is on her mind: 'Yeah! Apparently it is because it's about infidelity,' she says, chuckling. 'And there's too much going on already.'
It is the first time in our interview that Ryder has had that impish-punk quality that, in films such as Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, and Beetlejuice made her an icon of the MTV generation. The young woman sitting opposite me in a demure Prada outfit is at pains to show how much she has grown up. As Abigail Williams, in Nicholas Hytner's magnificent rendition of The Crucible, she has made a leap forward as an actress. Gone is the off-beat minimalism that has been her signature ever since, aged thirteen, she sidled out of a crowd of teenage children in David Seltzer's Lucas, and said in a deadpan voice: 'Hi! How was your summer?' Gone, too, is the androgynous Gestalt and sticky gaze. In its place is a performance that is rawer, more powerful and more (hetero) sexual than anything she has done before. Her eyes burn holes in the screen.
'It was the best acting experience I have ever had,' she says. 'And my relationship with Nick [Hytner] was the best I've ever had with a director. I feel like I've really found someone who understands me and communicates perfectly with me.' Hytner will collaborate with her again on her next film, The Object of My Affection, a comedy of sexual manners from Stephen McCauley's novel of the same name.
In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller has said that the idea driving The Crucible is 'the projection of one's own vileness on to others in order to wipe it out with their blood.' Put simply: Abigail is a mega-bitch. Ryder has a different take on the character
'To me, the key line in the movie is when Proctor [played by Daniel Day-Lewis] says to her, "We never touched." For a man to say that to a girl he's been fucking since she was a child! It's so sick. So abusive. It would be enough to send anyone spinning.' And spin she does, destroying a whole town because the man she loves has dumped her. 'I've always played the person that you root for, the person who does the right thing. And to play someone who is responsible, in a way, for these deaths, was a great challenge. But I had to justify it: you have to - you have no choice.'
Abigail Williams as an Oprah-style victim? When I suggest that, in another context, she would have been the sort of girl who betrayed Jews to the Gestapo because she had been jilted by a Rabbi, Ryder sucks in her breath with a strange, croaking sound.
The suggestion cuts to the bone. She was named Winona after the Minnesota town of her birth, and Ryder after Mitch Ryder, a jazz musician her father happened to be listening to when her agent called and asked how she wanted to appear on the credits of her first film. Her real name is Horowitz. Some of her relations died in the Holocaust. 'I'm Russian and Rumanian. So's most of my family. My grandparents made it out to America.' Is that where the melancholy, that always seems to be hovering just below the surface, comes from?
THE TRAGEDY AT THE CENTRE OF The Crucible is precipitated by Abigail's ability to act. She pretends to pull a dagger from her stomach. She shams seeing a yellow bird in the courthouse. Was it hard acting acting? 'Nick asked me to play it like we were really hallucinating. You're acting but you're still saying: "OK, this is really happening." But, eventually, she believes her own lies. She's clearly completely insane.'
Finding that insanity in herself was Ryder's greatest challenge: 'I think it's always complicated to play someone who's insane, but you have to understand their insanity, and that's an oxymoron.
Oxymoron is not the sort of word you hear very often in Hollywood, and few actresses claim to be bibliophiles. 'I have the best first-edition collection in the world! I have all of Salinger,' she enthuses (with her strong California accent it comes out as Sarrnjer). 'And all of George Orwell. A lot of Yeats. I have Forster, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde. It's what I spend my money on.'
Well, some of it. Though only 25, Ryder already has two houses: one in San Francisco, the other in Los Angeles. She drives a new Mercedes-Benz, and has a soft spot for not exactly cheap clothes from Milan. Up-close, she is minute. She might no longer have the seventeen-inch waist once reported of her - the elfin frame is filling out with womanly curves but the first, startling impression is one of tininess. Everything - her wrists, her ears, her feet - is in miniature, as though the shrinking process she underwent in Beetlejuice has not quite worn off.
'I blow over when it's windy,' she says, laughing. Has being so small affected the way she experiences the world? 'I love it romantically, I have to say. I love feeling small against a man.' Blushing. I change the subject.
'Does being so small make you feel vulnerable?' I ask, reminding her of an incident from her childhood, when two louts beat her up in her high-school locker-room (they thought that she was a gay boy). 'Yeah,' she says, chuckling. 'I wonder if I should have told that story. I mean, every kid was. But, yeah...'
The thought fizzles out. Then she leans forward, rests her chin in her hands, and becomes very serious: 'I used to think in my late adolescence - well actually, my mid-to-late adolescence, until I was about twenty - I used to think that I really didn't belong here. It wasn't a suicidal thought: it was very rational. Like, I don't think I was meant to be here on this planet.'
Like the screen icon of an earlier generation, Katharine Hepburn, Winona Ryder remains preoccupied with her childhood and adolescence. With the slightest prompting, she will talk about it at length. When she does, she has a way of disappearing into herself. She is rarely expansive and never theatrical. Yet, like a Peking Opera actor, she has a gamut of minimalist gestures with which she communicates feelings. Martin Scorsese, her favourite director, has said that all her energy is in her eyes, and it is true. Her body-language is cool. Her eyes are all heat and emotion: they glow with enthusiasm, they darken with Angst. 'I feel what happens to you when you're a kid, or a teenager, is as important as what happens to you as an adult. And I think it's important to give that kind of respect: speaking to a six-year-old about their problems should be as important as talking to an adult. I hated it when adults talked down to me. Kids are smart. I am much more fascinated by what they say than by most adults.'
Ryder's childhood was an unusual one, to say the least. Her father, Michael Horowitz, played a Sixties Boswell to Timothy Leary's Dr. Johnson, chronicling the LSD guru's every word and, at one time, even busting him out of jail and smuggling him to Switzerland. To return the favour, Leary became Winona's godfather. She was with him when he died last summer. 'These people were all sitting around really stoned, and I just wanted to go: "He was a person!" He wasn't just all this talk, all these words in books! He was a person. He was my godfather! My relationship with him was one of the most stable relationships I have ever had.'
The commune where Ryder lived with her parents and seven other families on a 300-acre tract of land among the redwoods of northern California was anything but stable. 'For years, I had tinfoil on my windows so no light could come in. I hated light. And my parents were really worried that I had that disease where I couldn't be in sunlight, or something. I moved the TV into my room, and I would just watch this channel that played old movies. I just wanted to remove myself completely from the world I was living in. I hated the whole hippie movement. I hated that we lived in a commune. I hated that we were always very poor. I didn't mind that, actually. But if we had to be poor I wanted it to be like in a movie. I wanted it to be like Oliver Twist' THE YEARS ON THE COMMUNE forged her personality. She will not 'do nude' in films. She loves comfort, not squalor; Armani, not gladrags; structure, not chaos. She does not take drugs. She does not drink. She does not sleep around. Surprisingly, she does adore her parents and siblings Sunyata, Jubal, and Yuri (for Yuri Gagarin, no less), though you can be sure that if she has children herself she will not choose names like those. 'I just wanted so desperately to be normal. Timothy Leary always said: "Question authority!" And I remember when I was little saying to my parents: "Well, you're my authority, and I'm questioning you. My rebellion and my individuality is this."'
Not that she is exactly 'normal'. She likes to hang out with singer Victoria Williams, a sort of female Arlo Guthrie. She is fascinated with other worlds and parallel universes. She likes off-beat films and books. But, when I suggest that her most recent intimate others, Johnny Depp and David Pirner, the hirsute singer of Soul Asylum, with whom she has just broken up, are Sixties-type rebels, she laughs. 'They're actually not. That's their image, maybe, but they're momma's boys, and have a strong sense of family. That was what attracted me to them.'
And that is all she will say about her love-life. She responds to questions with the candour of a teenager, and her reactions - a fluting laugh, a conspiratorial whisper - have a child-like spontaneity at odds with Hollywood's well-lacquered surfaces. But, by skating over difficult subjects and rambling on about ones with which she feels comfortable ('the best thing is to just talk away, and then the interviewer can't ask you too many questions'), she manages to withhold as much as she discloses.
This combination of naïveté and a highly evolved sense of self is the secret of her success. She has been a Hollywood insider since childhood (she made her first film at thirteen, and nine more in the next five years). Few actresses work harder at perfecting artifice. None is as besotted by or informed about Hollywood culture. She has seen, and sees, everything. An ingenue Winona Ryder is not.
Nicholas Hytner has said, 'She is having such a good career, because she never worries about her career.' But no one gets where she has got in Hollywood without worrying about every last detail of her career. By following her instincts, and being discriminating about the films she will do (bottom line: no junk), she has only increased her value.
It now stands at about S4 million per role, putting her just outside the top ten female earners. Recently, she has emerged as a major behind-the-scenes player. Little Women and Dracula (the only junk she has done) were made only because she went to bat for them. She has also been quietly building a career as a producer. She has secured film rights to several books, hired the script-writers, and commissioned the directors. One is Girl Interrupted, Susamia Kaysen's memoir of her confinement in a psychiatric hospital. The other is The Trials of Maria Barbella, by Idanna Pucci. Both are about the Weltschmerz of young women.
Winona Ryder knows all about that, but she seems to be leaving it behind. 'I read a quote of Meryl Streep where she said that she finally felt relaxed when she turned 40. She finally felt like she was in her own skin. And I finally feel like I am in my own skin. You spend years being treated like a kid, and worked like an adult, which is weird. Now I've graduated: 'I've done the cross-over'