Winona's Search for Sanity.

• Author: CONANT, JENNET
• Position: Winona Ryder - Brief Article

Her new role as disturbed teen hits close to home

After a two-year absence from the screen, Winona Ryder, 28, is ready for another close-up. Her new film, Girl, Interrupted, which opens on December 21, represents Ryder's return to film in a coming-of-age story--by now her stock in trade--only this time in a much grittier, more demanding role.

Girl, Interrupted is based on Susanna Kaysen's best-selling memoir of her two-year stay as a teenager at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric clinic outside Boston, Massachusetts.

As the 18-year-old Susanna, who attempted suicide by washing down 50 aspirin tablets with a pint of vodka, Ryder gives a wonderfully understated performance in the role of a young woman struggling to find some shred of sanity, both inside and outside the hospital walls.

Ryder has invested more of herself in this role than any other in her career. That's partly because of the raw, painful nature of the material, and partly because of its very personal connection to troubles in her own life, which she is talking about publicly for the first time.

Ryder did not have to go very far to research her role. When she was 20, the actress checked herself into a psychiatric ward for depression. Ryder says she had "hit bottom" at the end of a long, difficult parting with the actor Johnny Depp.

"I was overworked and overtired, too tired to sleep," she recalls. "I was in a really bad state." The insomnia and anxiety attacks she had been suffering on and off for years had become paralyzing.

WINONA, UGLY DUCKLING?

She also suffered from the effects of particularly bad typecasting at an impressionable age. In her first three films, she was cast successively as a geek (in Lucas), the girl with glasses (Square Dance), and a freaky witch (Beetlejuice). It was not until she took a leading part in Heathers in 1989, against her agent's advice, that she finally played someone who was not described in the script as ugly.

"I had been called that for so long, I had just come to accept it as fact," says Ryder. But she was never self-destructive. "I didn't do drugs; I didn't get loaded," she says. "But the depression. The worst part of it was not being able to describe it--the overwhelming horror of the anxiety attacks--even to my own family."

She signed herself out of the hospital a week later, feeling she had not been helped. Later, she found "a really excellent shrink," who convinced her that she could portray pain on the screen without having to put herself...