We are pleased to announce that Nigel Goodall’s biography of Winona will soon be available as a Print On Demand (POD) paperback. The POD will have existing eBook front cover artwork, with a new back cover that will be a graduated matching colour to the front cover with descriptive text. The interior text of the book will, of course, be the same as the eBook version. It is to be made available via all normal book retailers, wholesalers and via Amazon in the UK, Europe and the USA. Release date is yet to be confirmed.

From the original 1998 cover blurb…

In little more than ten years, and by none of the traditional routes, Winona Ryder has firmly established herself as the single most exciting actress of her generation. A child star who literally grew up in front of the camera, Winona is the first American actress since Natalie Wood to successfully transcend a career from adolescence to adulthood.

From her first moments on screen when she sidled out of a crowd of teenage children in David Seltzer’s Lucas and said “Hi! How was your summer?” Winona Ryder has been someone to watch. Her alert, expressive eyes telegraph a startling combination of intelligence, gravity and self possession rarely seen in the cinema today.

Intensely private, secretive, and guarded, Winona Ryder has been a public figure for more than half her life, and whereas her private persona remains an unwritten book, her public life demands attention. Now only in her mid-twenties, Winona is still growing as a person and developing as the most admired and important actress.

Now, this definitive biography traces how she came to arrive in Hollywood to make her motion picture debut at the age of thirteen, and how she reached the enviable postion of building a career strictly on her own terms by carefully avoiding the brat-pack blockbusters and rejecting the advice of agents, directors and other Hollywood insiders.

The book charts how Winona has won the respect and admiration of fans throughout the world with her offbeat beauty, fiery intelligence, wry wit and quirky charm through her early teen misfit roles in such classics as Beetlejuice, Heathers and Edward Scissorhands, and how her Academy Award nominated roles in The Age of Innocence and Little Women established her as a serious and respected actress, to her later mature roles in The Crucible, Alien Resurrection and Woody Allen’s Celebrity.

It tells a uniquely different Hollywood story from Winona’s unconventional childhood raised on a California commune surrounded by such counterculture figures as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlingetti, and Winona’s late godfather, Timothy Leary; of her troubled school years, from being vicously attacked by school bullies through her independent home study to enrolling in drama classes at San Francisco’s prestigious American Conservatory Theatre, making her first fillm, and borrowing her name from Sixties rocker Mitch Ryder.

The book gives a detailed account of a remarakbale career in a decade of making over twenty films that has included notoriety of being engaged to Hollywood rebel Johnny Depp; of her dedication to the search for missing children through her crusade to find kidnapped, and later murdered child, Polly Klaas; and of the drive that causes her to be constantly working even through physical exhaustion, and her refusal to conform to the Hollywood ideal of fame.

This affectionate and immensely readable biography is based on Winona Ryder’s own memories and recollections through her media interviews as well as those from friends, relatives, directors, colleagues and co-stars.

About the Book…

The book was the first British biography of Winona to be published in 1998. It was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, became a Daily Telegraph bestseller, and the source for several major TV documentaries transmitted in the UK, USA and Canada. The book also won its author, Nigel Goodall, recognition as Ryder’s key biographer. His research archives still serve to this day as a primary resource for television, magazines and libraries.

An eBook edition of the original paperback, with new cover design, and completely revised by restoring passages cut out of the original manuscript together with the addition of new material that covers the same period of the original print edition, was made available, under license from Nigel Goodall, in 2010 by digital distributor Andrews UK.