Winona's Search for Sanity.

Her new role as disturbed teen hits close to home

After a two-year absence from the screen, Winona Ryder, 28, is ready for another close-up. Her new film, Girl, Interrupted, which opens on December 21, represents Ryder's return to film in a coming-of-age story--by now her stock in trade--only this time in a much grittier, more demanding role.

Girl, Interrupted is based on Susanna Kaysen's best-selling memoir of her two-year stay as a teenager at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric clinic outside Boston, Massachusetts.

As the 18-year-old Susanna, who attempted suicide by washing down 50 aspirin tablets with a pint of vodka, Ryder gives a wonderfully understated performance in the role of a young woman struggling to find some shred of sanity, both inside and outside the hospital walls.

Ryder has invested more of herself in this role than any other in her career. That's partly because of the raw, painful nature of the material, and partly because of its very personal connection to troubles in her own life, which she is talking about publicly for the first time.

Ryder did not have to go very far to research her role. When she was 20, the actress checked herself into a psychiatric ward for depression. Ryder says she had "hit bottom" at the end of a long, difficult parting with the actor Johnny Depp.

"I was overworked and overtired, too tired to sleep," she recalls. "I was in a really bad state." The insomnia and anxiety attacks she had been suffering on and off for years had become paralyzing.

WINONA, UGLY DUCKLING?

She also suffered from the effects of particularly bad typecasting at an impressionable age. In her first three films, she was cast successively as a geek (in Lucas), the girl with glasses (Square Dance), and a freaky witch (Beetlejuice). It was not until she took a leading part in Heathers in 1989, against her agent's advice, that she finally played someone who was not described in the script as ugly.

"I had been called that for so long, I had just come to accept it as fact," says Ryder. But she was never self-destructive. "I didn't do drugs; I didn't get loaded," she says. "But the depression. The worst part of it was not being able to describe it--the overwhelming horror of the anxiety attacks--even to my own family."

She signed herself out of the hospital a week later, feeling she had not been helped. Later, she found "a really excellent shrink," who convinced her that she could portray pain on the screen without having to put herself through it continually.

Beneath Ryder's fragile, waiflike exterior is a surprisingly canny veteran. She has 24 films to her credit, including Edward Scissorhands, with Depp in 1990, and two Academy Award nominations, for best actress in Little Women and best supporting actress in The Age of Innocence.

Ryder describes her parents as "1960s intellectual beatniks." Her father, Michael Horowitz, is a rare-book dealer and an archivist of counterculture literature. (Ryder is Winona's professional name.) Her mother, Cindy, a writer and editor, often kept her precocious daughter home from school to watch classic black--and-white movies.

Ryder's acting career got its start after she was kicked out of school in Petaluma, California. On the first day of seventh grade, she had dressed up like the film star James Cagney, complete with crew cut and thrift-shop suit. On the third day of school, she was beaten up by a group of students, who slammed her head into a locker and called her a faggot.

"They kicked me out and asked me not to come back," she says. "They said I was a distraction."

She studied at home after that, and took acting classes at the famous American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. By the end of her first year, the 12-year-old misfit had her own agent, and was discovered soon afterward while dining in a restaurant. "So I have those kids to thank for where I am today." she says, referring to her seventh-grade tormentors.

Ryder is hoping her star power will help Girl, Interrupted find an audience, despite its serious topic.

"This movie will be an example," she says. "If it does well, the studios may be inclined to make more personal movies and lake more chances. Those are the movies that always end up being classics." And she has always wanted to be in a classic.

(Girl, Interrupted is rated `R')

MY MIXED-UP LIFE: Winona Ryder says she feels a close bond with the character she plays in Girl, Interrupted a film about a teenager in a psychiatric clinic.