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It manic Monday! This means we have another 90’s icon of the week and today’s spotlight is the one and only Winona Ryder. Born Winona Laura Horowitz, in Olmstead County, Minnesota, to an author and video producer, the award winning actress started taking acting classes as a young child. She broke into Hollywood in the late ‘80s with iconic films like Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) and Heather (1989). By the 1990 Ryder’s career was unstoppable, making her mark on Hollywood with the unforgettable, Edward Scissorhands.
Her unique beauty and captivating eyes had everyone intrigued, including her co-star, Johnny Depp. The couple began dating in 1989 when Ryder was 18 and he was 27 and had a steamy romance that led to a quick engagement. Depp was so in love he had “Winona forever” tattooed on his arm. They stayed together until 1993 and the split was heartbreaking for each of them. According to Tim Burton, Depp was “never the same” after. The Beetlejuice star has admitted Depp was her “first everything.” “My first real kiss. My first real boyfriend. My first fiancé. The first guy I had sex with. So he’ll always be in my heart. Forever. Kind of funny, that word.” Ryder said.
After the split, Ryder continued to work but everyone was confused in December 2001 when the actress was caught shoplifting half a million dollars worth of clothes and accessories from Saks 5th avenue in Beverly hills. The 30-year-old was arrested after being seen both visually and on video removing security tags and placing them in a bag she had and leaving the store, per Beverly Hills police. While most celebrities seem to get away with criminal cases with a slap on the wrist, the prosecution made an example of the star and insisted the trial be televised. Because of the aggressive and desperate paparazzi, she ended up with a fractured elbow, as a result, per Hollywood Biography. Despite requests to plead no contest to a misdemeanor, she was found guilty of grand theft and vandalism and was sentenced to three years probation and 480 hours of community service. Ryder was offered the lead film in the infamous Woody Allen’s 2003 “Melinda and Melinda” but was considered too much of insurance risk and was dropped.
In 2004 her chargers were reviewed and successfully reduced to misdemeanors. From then on she started her comeback tour and proved to be an actress that can handle comedy, drama, and Sci-Fi. Ryder was cast alongside Robert Downey Jr and Keanu Reeves in Richard Linklater‘s 2006 Sci-Fi film “A Scanner Darkly.” Coincidentally, just like Ryder, Downey was also dropped by “Melinda and Melinda” producers for being a flight risk.
By 2007 she had already signed up for 3 more roles and started her journey to a successful comeback. The actress starred in several films over the next few years and had a huge supporting role in 2010 as an aging ballet star in Black Swan. Six years later the world would become obsessed with the Netflix sci-fi-horror series Stranger Things. Fans were excited to see Ryder star as a single mother whose 12-year-old son vanishes mysteriously. After three successful seasons, fans are eager for season 4 of the show which is likely to be released sometime in the first half of 2022, per Collider.
When it comes to her personal life, the actress has been dating Scott Mackinlay Hahn for the last 10 years. She’s kept the details about their relationship out of the public eye and has remained drama-free. The private actress has done a good job keeping things private and it‘s not even certain how the couple met. Ryder calls herself a “serial monogamist” but is not sure if she will ever get married. “But marriage? I don’t know,” she told Net-a-Porter’s The Edit. “I’d rather never have been married than been divorced a few times. Not that there’s anything wrong with divorce, but I don’t think I could do it if that was a possibility. When your parents are madly in love for 45 years, your standards are really high. But I’ve been happily with someone for quite a while now.”
If things don’t work out with Mackinlay, Ryder will always have her best friend Keanu Reeves. Although the actors have both admitted to having crushes on each other they’ve kept it professional and have starred in several films together like Dracula, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and Destination Wedding. In 2018 the actors opened up about their “healthy crushes” while promoting Destination Wedding. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight Ryder confessed she’s had a “pretty big, healthy crush” on her co-star ever since they met. “I had a big, healthy crush on you, too,” Reeves gushed in response. “It’s still raging,” Ryder professed. “trust me.”
They might even be married. She told Entertainment Tonight they got married in 1992 while filming Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” “We actually got married in ‘Dracula,’” she said. “No, I swear to god I think we’re married in real life.” “In that scene, Francis [Ford Coppola] used a real Romanian priest,” she said. “We shot the master and he did the whole thing. So I think we’re married.” “Don’t you remember that?” Ryder said to Reeves. “It was on Valentine’s Day.” Reeves responded, “Oh my gosh, we’re married.”