Ryder’s ugly Hollywood experiences

Winona Ryder grew up in Hollywood in the 1980s and ’90s, a time when sexism, bullying, and bigotry were rife in the movie business, said Laura Atkinson in The Times (U.K.). When she was 19 and fresh from filming Edward Scissorhands, the actress recalls, dozens of photographers tried to grab her attention as she got off a plane by shouting “Whore!” “It really messed me up,” says Ryder, now 48. “I was so paranoid. I had to learn a lot of lessons early on.” She heard that insult again two years later, while shooting Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But this time it was director Francis Ford Coppola who shouted, “You whore! You whore!” at Ryder in an attempt to make her cry on screen. She didn’t. “Me and Francis are good now,” she smiles. Ryder has had many other ugly experiences in Hollywood, including an encounter with a cigar-smoking Mel Gibson at a party. “He said to my friend, who’s gay, ‘Oh, wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’” Ryder, who is Jewish, said Gibson then asked her, “You’re not an oven dodger, are you?” Gibson denies making the comments, but Ryder says such antiSemitism is common in the industry. “There are times when people have said, ‘Wait, you’re Jewish? But you’re so pretty!’”