Ryder, Winona (1971– )

US film actor. A versatile and prolific performer, she has worked with some of the leading filmmakers of contemporary US cinema, including Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence, 1993), Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth, 1991), Woody Allen (Celebrity, 1998), Francis Ford Coppola (Dracula, 1992), and Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, 1990).

Ryder broke into the film industry in the late 1980s, with teen roles in Beetlejuice (1988), Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990), Mermaids (1990), and, most notably, the independent cult classic Heathers (1989). Her range was suggested by two differing roles in 1994, when she played an angst-ridden twenty-something in Reality Bites and, in one of several period roles, Jo March in an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. While many of her screen roles, notably that of Blanca in House of the Spirits (1993), Abigail in The Crucible (1996), and as an inmate of a mental asylum in Girl, Interrupted (2000), have been intensely dramatic, her early work has also shown her to be a skilled comic performer.

Among her other films are How to Make An American Quilt (1995), Looking for Richard (1996), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Autumn in New York (2000), Lost Souls (2000), Mr Deeds (2002), The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2004), and A Scanner Darkly (2006). She has twice been nominated for Academy Awards, for her performances in The Age of Innocence and Little Women.