30 Remarkable Photos of a ’90s-Era Winona Ryder

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’s played on screen seem 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 (earning two Oscar nominations in the process), Ryder was a child star who started acting lessons at 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 now, Ryder came back to claim her goth girl crown with a role in the epic Stranger Things. At premieres and fan events season after season, Ryder has kept to her own glamorous, gothic aesthetic: For the Stranger Things 5 premiere in LA, she wore a striking Yohji Yamamoto spring summer 1998 set—Lydia Deetz all grown up.

This week saw Stranger Things finally bid its gang a moving farewell. 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.