Although she made her film debut in 1986, the movie that launched Winona Ryder to fame as a youth icon of the time was Beetlejuice, her first collaboration with Tim Burton. Her character, the jaded young woman with a gothic sensibility who can talk to ghosts, Lydia Deetz, is the centerpiece of the story, in a battle between the dead and the (frivolous) living for control of a house.
More than three decades later, Ryder reunites with Tim Burton for the highly anticipated sequel: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It’s also a sort of "ing of the torch," as Lydia Deetz now has a daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), the new young muse of Burton after their collaboration in the series Wednesday.
Winona Ryder's second collaboration with Tim Burton not only solidified her as a star but did the same for her then-partner, actor Johnny Depp. Edward Scissorhands is a gothic fantasy that pokes fun at suburban conformity, from which Ryder's character, the teenager Kim Boggs, is an expression of rejection: she chooses comion for the different and strange.
Jim Jarmusch is one of the emblematic directors of the era, and Ryder's character in the anthology Night on Earth couldn't better represent her sensibility as an actress and Gen X icon: Corky is a young, carefree taxi driver, apparently aimless in life but with a defiant attitude towards conventions. Ryder shared the screen with one of her greatest influences, actress Gena Rowlands, who is also her counterpoint: the epitome of a renowned, feminine, and glamorous star.
Mina Harker is the center of the conflict in the classic novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, and Winona Ryder was cast to portray her in the Francis Ford Coppola adaptation, which promised to be the most faithful to the novel and the most ambitious. The actress managed to capture all the nuances of the character, from the innocent and tragic to the more sinister and seductive.