How Winona Ryder Made It to the Other Side

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It is a warm afternoon in late spring, and Winona Ryder and I are walking through the Oakland Cemetery, a Victorian-style graveyard located in the center of Atlanta. Large oak and magnolia trees shade the manicured paths as we stroll between the grand mausoleums and tombstones. Ryder is wearing a straw bonnet, with a well-worn Leonard Cohen T-shirt under a black chore jacket that has a pin of a cartoon drawing of Jim Jarmusch affixed to its lapel. Her eyes are rimmed with eyeliner, and her sneakers are splattered with paint. Ryder is the first to admit that the word icon has become overused: “Everyone uses it now, and they don’t know what a real icon is,” she says. But she looks, as she always has, like the poster child for Gen X. She defined cinema in the ’90s, embodying both a romantic moodiness and an idealistic dissatisfaction that few other actors have rivaled.