It tracks that Winona Ryder, every goth girl’s ’90s style icon, would be born just two days before Halloween. From Heathers to Edward Scissorhands, Bram Stoker’s Dracula to The Age of Innocence, the off-kilter and other-worldly characters she played on screen seemed totally in tune with her off-duty penchant for black slip dresses, white lace, and a bright red lip.
But, before she became the poster girl for her era, and earned two Oscar nominations while doing it, Ryder was a child star, who started acting lessons aged 12, and made her screen debut at 14, in the high-school drama Lucas, opposite a young Corey Haim and Charlie Sheen. Two years later, Tim Burton came calling with Beetlejuice, and the part of the hollow-eyed, shimmying Lydia Deetz, which swiftly made the actor a household name.
Almost a decade ago, too, Ryder came back to claim her goth girl crown, with a role in the epic Stranger Things. (In which, she also passed along the baton to the next era of Hollywood bright young things.) Across season after season premiere and fan event, Ryder has kept to her own glamorous, gothic aesthetic: For the L.A. Stranger Things 5 premiere, she wore a striking Yohji Yamamoto spring summer 1998 set—Lydia Deetz all grown up.
This week saw a moving farewell to the five-season long super-show Stranger Things. As Joyce Byers, Ryder embraced the role of a fiercely protective mother, the emotional backbone of the series, who had her rightful full-circle moment in the finale. And so, we present 30 glorious throwback photos from the first decade of Winona Ryder’s career, charting her rise from fresh face to Hollywood heavyweight.