Why Winona is haunted by horrors of Holocaust
looking like “an effeminate boy”. When 1988 hit Beetlejuice made her famous she thought things would improve.
“But it made things worse,” she said. “They called me a witch.”
In the same year, then 17, she won rave reviews as the murderous teenage girlfriend of Christian Slater in cult hit Heathers. Then, in 1990, she fell in love with her Edward Scissorhands co-star Johnny Depp.
She was 17, he was 26. They got engaged after five months.
“He was my first everything,” she said later. “My first real kiss. My first real boyfriend. My first fiancé. The first guy I had sex with.”
Their split, three years on, left both deeply wounded. Depp famously had the tattoo “Winona Forever” on his arm changed to “Wino Forever”. Director Tim Burton said that afterwards “he wasn’t acting like Johnny any more. It’s almost like Winona took Johnny’s soul”.
Winona tried to drown her sorrows with booze and almost ended up dying when a lit cigarette set fire to her hotel room.
The pair remained close – and Winona is currently preparing to give evidence supporting Depp in his High Court libel action over allegations that he beat his former wife Amber Heard.
A string of movie hits dotted the 1990s for Winona. Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in 1993 won her a Golden Globe. A year later she played Jo March in Little Women – dedicating the role to Polly Klaas, 12, a girl from her home town who was kidnapped and murdered. She remains close to the family and supports a foundation in Polly’s name.
But in 2001, problems surfaced when Winona was arrested for shoplifting $6,000 worth of merchandise from Saks Fifth Avenue in Los Angeles. Police found her with a syringe, painkillers and tranquillisers provided by a quack doctor.
Winona was given community service, handed hefty fines and placed on probation for three years.
She stopped acting for a while – what she calls “my hiatus”. In 2010 she made a blistering movie return in Black Swan as an ageing ballerina fighting to stay relevant. A year later she fell for Scott Mackinlay Hahn, who she has been spending lockdown with. In 2016, she won a new army of fans as a determined single mum in Netflix’s sci-fi thriller series Stranger Things. And she was delighted to play Evelyn in The Plot Against America, not least because Philip Roth is a favourite author and she loved his 2004 novel. “I read it one sitting, it’s a brilliant book and really interesting because of my own family history,” she said.
The novel has taken on a new significance in light of Donald Trump’s divisive presidency. One line really sums that up: “There’s a lot of hate out there. And he knows how to tap into it.”
“Can you believe that?” says Winona. “It’s pretty incredible how relevant it is.”
She has even been accused of taking on the role as an anti-Trump protest. Winona says: “Apparently, I said a few things and someone said, ‘Well 62 million people are now going to boycott Stranger Things – so there!’
“But you can’t just sit back because you don’t want to be disliked or have people not watch your show.
“I’m the daughter of two writers and historians and was really lucky I got to grow up in a family that talked about stuff that wasn’t being discussed.
“In school, when teaching historical stuff, I’d say, ‘Well what about when this happened?’ and I literally got detention. Now I’m astonished at some of the things going on.
“I never thought I’d see a swastika paraded at a march and shown on national TV. So it’s now or never. You have to take a stand, you have to! And the way to do that is by voting.”
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