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December 27, 1999
Web posted at: 5:18 p.m. EST (2218 GMT)

From Paul Vercammen
CNN Entertainment News Correspondent

HOLLYWOOD (CNN) -- "Girl, Interrupted" stars Winona Ryder in a performance with some parallels to her own life. The film is based on the best-selling memoir of Susanna Kaysen, institutionalized when she was 18 years old.

Set in the late 1960s, "Girl, Interrupted" is based on the book of the same title and directed by "Cop Land" director James Mangold. Angelina Jolie, Vanessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg co-star in the film.

Winona Ryder stars as Kaysen, who's told after she lands in a mental ward that she put herself there by chasing "a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka."

"I had a headache," she protests to her caring captors, later asking, "How the hell am I supposed to recover when I don't even understand my disease?"

Born Winona Horowitz in 1971 in Winona, Minnesota -- she was named for her birthplace -- Ryder's film career took its first big step forward in 1988, when at 17 she landed a role as the angst-ridden teen daughter of big-city socialites in Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice."

Ryder plays a woman committed to a mental ward

Also in 1988, she appeared in "1969." In 1989, she was seen in "Great Balls of Fire!" and "Heathers," a cult classic about the travails of being in your high school's "it" clique when your boyfriend is an antisocial, homicidal maniac.

That same year, at 19, Ryder went to a hospital for debilitating anxiety attacks.

"I checked myself in because I was just so exhausted," Ryder says, "and I was working so much and I think anyone would back me up in saying 19 is just a really tough year."

In addition, she says, it's normal to not be normal all the time. "Human beings have good days and bad days, and have impulses."

Jolie

Co-star Jolie, who plays a self-destructive young woman named Lisa, was nominated for a Golden Globe for her supporting role. The Golden Globes are familiar territory for this golden girl, who has two trophies on her mantle already for the TV movies "Gia" and "Wallace."

The two young actresses bonded, both on and off camera. "We let all of our flaws go," Jolie says. "We let go of all of our private thoughts, and we embraced each other."

The intense relationship that evolves on-screen takes Ryder's character on a healing journey of self discovery. "She sees Lisa as being free," Ryder says, "and wants to be free like that, and she wants to be crazy and impulsive. She also is very sexually confused and attracted to her."

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Kaysen went into the mental institution with a prescription of a "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once. Yet she found it was difficult to get out once committed, and wound up spending nearly a year in the ward.

"Back then, you used to lock people up and throw away the key if they just felt sensitive, or if they rebelled in any way," Ryder says.

And although "Girl, Interrupted" takes place in 1967, Ryder raises questions about the state of mental health care today. "We are living in a society where we are medicating our toddlers for showing signs of personality because their parents are too exhausted to take care of them."