Bette Davis, she was so brilliant and one of my heroes, but she worked a ton, and then she didn't get All About Eve [1950] until the last minute. Claudette Colbert was supposed to be Margo Channing, but then she broke her back and couldn't do it. That allowed Davis to play her age.

Winona Ryder

Categorized in : Play Age Hero

When you finally accept that it's OK not to have answers and it's OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.

Winona Ryder

confused perfect feelings

I've learned that it's OK to be flawed, that life can be messy, that some days you glide and some days you fall, but most important, that there are no secret answers out there.

Winona Ryder

important secret fall

You go through spells where you feel that maybe you're too sensitive for this world. I certainly felt that.

Winona Ryder

sensitive feels world

Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me, amplified.

Winona Ryder

crazy dark depression

I was inspired by lots of people, certainly in acting and in writing and stuff, but I never wanted to be somebody else.

Winona Ryder

acting writing people

When I met Johnny, I was pure virgin. He changed that. He was my 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.

Winona Ryder

real heart sex

Suddenly you're the mom, or you go from ... You're not an ingénue, you don't want to play an ingénue, but it's like that line in The First Wives Club [1996]: "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy."

Winona Ryder

wife mom play

A woman who wears high heels is very different, I think, than a woman who wears sandals.

Winona Ryder

high-heels different thinking

You have good days and bad days, and depression's something that, you know, is always with you.

Winona Ryder

mental-health good-day bad-day

You can't pay enough money to... cure that feeling of being broken and confused.

Winona Ryder

confused broken feelings

I am not a person who can really sit around and think about regrets because with every bad experience that you have, there is weirdly something good that comes from it.

Winona Ryder

bad-experiences regret thinking

I was mid-sentence when the casting director said, "Listen, kid. You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don't have it." She was very blunt - I honestly think that she thought she was doing me a favor.

Winona Ryder

kids school thinking

I write pretty much every day, but I don't have any desire to publish anything.

Winona Ryder

publish desire writing

As an actress, you want to try new things. You don't want to repeat yourself. That becomes more important to you, as you get older.

Winona Ryder

important want trying

I thought it was a cool parallel. Being replaced by the young thing. I know that definitely happens in Hollywood. It's harder to find good roles, and suddenly there's new girls. I'm at that age I've been warned my whole life about.

Winona Ryder

hollywood girl age

In high school, I dressed up as every James Bond girl. I was a teenage Pussy Galore.

Winona Ryder

teenage girl school

Money doesn't matter on a deeply personal level. It doesn't make you feel any happier. But of course I am very aware that I don't have to worry about earning a living or about those very important practical things that most people have to worry about on a very real level.

Winona Ryder

real worry people

I remember when I first started being in magazines, I had pretty thin skin. I was this nerd that read books and stayed home and didn't go out.

Winona Ryder

nerd home book

I've learned that it's OK to be flawed.

Winona Ryder

flawed ive-learned flaws

You're lucky if you're in three great movies, or even one great movie. I've been so lucky. But if you rely on the business to dictate whether you're happy, it gets really complicated. You just can't do that. There have been times in my life that I've done that, and I've found it depressing.

Winona Ryder

depressing three lucky