Winona Ryder Is Thankful Her Parents Kept Her from Moving to Hollywood Early in Her Career: ‘Such a Gift’

Beetlejuice star Winona Ryder revealed that her parents refused to let her live in Los Angeles while she was a young aspiring actress, because they were “very wary of Hollywood.”

“I had to keep up my grades,” Ryder told AnOther magazine. “I couldn’t work if it coincided with school. My parents — who are just my best friends — were very wary of Hollywood.”

“That turned out to be such a gift, because I knew a lot of kids who did bear that,” the 52-year-old actress added. “They relocated and were supporting their whole family, and it didn’t turn out so great. I knew a lot of kids who got burnout.”

The Stranger Things actress explained that her parents associated Hollywood with Judy Garland’s fatal overdose in 1969.

“They associated it with Judy Garland’s tragedy, and we never relocated there,” she said.

Instead of moving to Los Angeles, Ryder’s parents drove her seven hours from their home in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, to Los Angeles whenever she had an audition.

Ryder noted that she later found out that she “had this reputation for being really choosy” when accepting acting projects, “when actuality we just couldn’t afford to go.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the Girl, Interrupted star said she believes she rose to fame “at an interesting time,” when rebellious characters were more typically played by men, so women taking on such roles really stood out.

“I think I came along at an interesting time,” Ryder said. “In the 70s there was this revolution in film but then it’s like they found this formula in the mid-80s in American films, whether it was Rambo or John Hughes, where you’re the kid sister or you’re the daughter.”

“There were girls or there were women,” she added. “That’s a big reason I wanted to make films like Heathers or Little Women — because we didn’t have a lot of that adolescent time, in film or literature. Men did. Men had Lord of the Flies and Holden Caulfield.”

Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.