Winona Ryder names “one of the best moments in cinema”
Even as far back as her breakthrough performance in Beetlejuice, it was clear that Winona Ryder possessed an unrivalled brilliance that would set up a glittering career in the film industry. Following up with big roles in Heathers, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that initial promise transcended to stardom, and the actor continued to rise.
However, while the 1990s were incredibly accomplished for Ryder, with performances in The Age of Innocence, Little Women and Girl, Interrupted, Ryder suffered a career dip in the 2000s, though came back towards the end of the decade with yet further quality efforts in Black Swan and Stranger Things.
While so many of Ryder’s remarkable performances have comprised some of the best moments of cinema over the past three decades, the actor herself has never stopped short of offering her praise where she feels it’s due, and in a feature with AnOther, Ryder named the performances of other actors that have inspired her the most.
“There’s a French film called Ponette, which stars a little girl, Victoire Thivisol,” Ryder began. “In the film, her mother dies and the child is taken by her father to stay with her aunt and cousins. The film is about how adults tell children confusing things when their parents die. Like, ‘Pray and you’ll see her in your dreams.’ They mean well and the girl tries everything they tell her.”
She added: “There’s a scene, shot in one take, where she goes into a chapel and prays for her mother to come back. It starts unemotionally and then she begins to cry, and because it’s one long take, it’s amazing to see how she really acts out one emotion. She won best actress at the Venice Film Festival.”
Ponette is the 1996 French film directed by Jacques Doillon, which focuses on the four-year-old titular character who must come to terms with the death of her mother following a car crash. Thivisol was only four years old herself at the time of filming, and her performance was widely acclaimed upon the film’s release.
Elsewhere, Ryder expressed an admiration for the work of William Holden. “He took the riskiest parts,” she said. “Sunset Boulevard for instance, in which he plays a kind of male prostitute. He’s also the anti-hero in The Bridge Over the River Kwai. There is a great scene at the end of that movie, when Alec Guinness is pulling the cord and you see William Holden’s face. I watched it with Scorsese and Jay Cox, and we all agreed that the close-up of William Holden saying ‘kill him’ is one of the best moments in cinema.”
Holden played struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis, who is dragged into a crazed fantasy worked by a former silent-film star, in the 1950 black comedy Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, while The Bridge Over the River Kwai saw the iconic actor star in David Lean’s 1957 epic war film, widely considered one of the greatest ever made.
Finally, Ryder noted the brilliance of John Cazale in The Deer Hunter and The Godfather, admitting that when a supporting actor steals the limelight from the star, she calls the feat “Cazaling it”, and similarly when an “actress blushes on screen”, as Juliette Binoche does in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then it ought to be referred to as “Binoched”.
