Winona Ryder

Shot in the summer of 1985, the film co-starred Charlie Sheen and Kerri Green with Winona playing Rina, one of Lucas’s friends at school. When asked how she wanted her name to appear in the credits, she suggested "Ryder" as her surname because a Mitch Ryder album that belonged to her father was playing in the background.

Her next movie was Square Dance (1987), where her teenage character creates a bridge between two different worlds – a traditional farm in the middle of nowhere and a large city. Ryder won acclaim for her role, and The Los Angeles Times called her performance in Square Dance "a remarkable debut." Both films, however, failed to gain Ryder any notice, and were only marginally successful commercially. Director Tim Burton decided to cast Ryder in his film Beetlejuice (1988), after being impressed with her performance in Lucas. In the film, she plays goth teenager Lydia Deetz. Lydia's family moves to a haunted house populated by ghosts played by Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin, and Michael Keaton. Lydia quickly finds herself the only human with a strong empathy toward the ghosts and their situation. The film was a success at the box office, and Ryder's performance and the overall film received mostly positive reviews from critics. Read Less

Ryder starred alongside Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr., and Woody Harrelson. Live action scenes were transformed with rotoscope software and the film was entirely animated. A Scanner Darkly was screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival. Critics disagreed over the film's merits; Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times found the film "engrossing" and wrote that "the brilliance of film is how it suggests, without bombast or fanfare, the ways in which the real world has come to resemble the dark world of comic books." Matthew Turner of View London, believing the film to be "engaging" and "beautifully animated," praised the film for its "superb performances" and original, thought-provoking screenplay." Ryder appeared in the comedy The Darwin Awards with Joseph Fiennes. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2006. Read Less