Winona Ryder felt “ashamed” at her early career success
The career of Winona Ryder is somewhat turbulent. She rose to prominence as a child actor, making her film debut in David Seltzer’s Lucas before gaining notoriety for her performance in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice. Several big roles followed in films such as Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the latter of which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
The 1990s were kind to Ryder, and she earned a number of award nominations for her performances in the likes of The Age of Innocence, Little Women and Girl, Interrupted. These days, Ryder is known for her role in Stranger Things, but that only arrived after several years in the 2000s of depression and career low points.
Following Ryder’s initial success in the film industry as a child, she began to feel nervous about how other people perceived her. She once told the Irish Examiner, “They’d be judging me: ‘Look at her shoes. I bet they cost $400.’ In fact, I grew up with no money – we lived without electricity, running water or heating except for a stove”.
She continued, noting a sense of “shame” that resulted from her success. “I know how nauseating it is when actors complain about their lives. We’re sickeningly well-paid people who have very charmed lives. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have problems. For a long time, I was ashamed of being an actress. I felt like it was a shallow occupation.”
If a feeling of shame weren’t enough, then what followed was even worse. Elsewhere, Ryder admitted to Highly Sensitive, “I had had panic attacks from the age of 12 – probably from the pressure of working and then going through adolescence onscreen”. She also told the Tampa Bay Times, “It was mainly exhaustion, but the anxiety attacks were getting worse, and I didn’t know what to do about them”.
By the time Ryder’s acclaimed performance in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted came around, she was truly burnt out, although the film’s subject matter, about a girl with depression, helped her to realise that she wasn’t the only person to be suffering from bouts of poor mental health.
Sadly, a widely-publicised incident of shoplifting occurred in 2001, but the result of this was that Ryder quickly realised that she needed a break from the whole ordeal of acting and being in the public eye. She told Time: “I took some years off, and I didn’t realise that was very dangerous in terms of my career.”
She added: “I was constantly being told, ‘You have to keep working so you stay relevant. When I was ready to come back, I was like, ‘Oh, where did everyone go?’ A lot of actors have ups and downs. I think mine were – people might see them as awful – but I learned, and I appreciated the time away.” Thankfully, the time away did Ryder the world of good, and her performance in Stranger Things has helped her to overcome her former “shame”.
