Harper's Bazaar, January 1997

They first acted together in The Age of Innocence, in which Ryder played a New York society wife and Day-Lewis the husband who dreamed of wilder shores. Now, in The Crucible, the movie adaptation of Arthur Miller's famed play, Day-Lewis is a strong-willed Puritan farmer and Ryder the teenage servant he has bedded and turned his back on. For the first time, Ryder gets to drop being adorable and play desperate, angry, lusty. Winona shouts! "I can't remember raising my voice in a film betore," she says. She even bares part of a breast and makes a grab tor Day-Lewis' crotch.

In both movies, Day-Lewis does everything he can to get away.

In real life, nothing could be further from the truth. They are friends (yes, yes, we've heard that rumor, too...). When they meet for the Bazaar cover shoot, the ordinarily dour Day-Lewis brightens. He picks up the five-foot-three Ryder and twirls her in the air. They chat and laugh. They put their arms around each other for photographer Patrick Demarchelier, then hold the pose even when they are free to retreat to opposite corners and check their makeup.

When it's time for the tape recorder though, the gentleman vanishes. Ryder, more comfortable with the mechanics of Hollywood hype, explains in a roundabout way that this is a waste of time: "All actors," she says, "give you the same Brando quote about, like, how acting is like ripping your heart out. And I just really ... I don't know. I mean, I understand what they're saying. Sometmes it is very painful. But I just... I thoroughly enjoy it." An apologetic smile. "Acting is the only time you can do something awful and be forgiven for it five minutes later."

Ryder plays the servant girl, Abigail Williams, as an abused teenager, proud and bitter. As John Proctor, her paramour, Day-Lewis is a model of troubled rectitude and manly five-day growth. "Daniel's very sexy," comments Arthur Miller, who adapted the 1952 play for the screen. "And at the same time, he's able to carry that load of anxiety, guilt, and self-doubt." Consumed by adolescent rage, Abigail will do anything to get John back, including accusing his wife (played by the superb Joan Allen) of bewitching her. "Abigail's a mess," says Ryder "She's calculating. She's a victim. She's hurt. I had to keep her intensity, but I didn't want to play her as a bitch."

"Winona's able to convey precise focus, precise desire, very, very well indeed," says director Nicholas Hytner. "She's very good at wanting something." Hytner, in town to cast the film version of Stephen McAuley's novel The Object of My Affection, stops by the shoot to pick up Ryder and Day-Lewis for tea. They convince him to stay for a photo. Together they meld into a grinning three-headed monster. The picture says: We got this movie made our way.

Even tor Hollywood, the air of satisfaction among those who made this story ot the 1692 Salem witch trials is remarkable. Ryder had wanted to act in the play since reading it when she was 13. The 81-year-old Miller, who waited 40 years for the right director and cast, says he is "thrilled." Day-Lewis, in turn, was evidently so taken with the screenplay that he married the writer's daughter. Even the studio is rhapsodic. "This one was hard to get going," acknowledges 20th Century Fox president Tom Rothman. "It's not 101 Dalmatians. It's a completely uncompromised version of the play. Daniel doesn't ride off happy in the end."

The primary reason that The Crucible wasn't, as Rothman jokes, "updated to a valley mall" was Hytner, a director with a unique double gift for theater (he directed the Broadway productions of Miss Saigon and the Tony Award-winning Carousel) and film. Hytner had clout with Rothman: the two had worked together three years before on Hytner's first movie, The Madness of King George, which received four Oscar nominations. And Hytner was eager for another chance to make a period movie.

He shot the film in the unspoiled wilderness of Hog Island, MA, near where the model for John Proctor had his farm 300 years ago. The crew rebuilt parts of the village by hand, with Day-Lewis, an enthusiastic carpenter, participating. One of the instructions for the cast was to stay dirty, but there were limits: Ryder gets a toned-down version of the grime-and-grease look sported by her sisters in witchery, and Day-Lewis was spared the Madeline-style hat other men in the cast wore. "We put him in one, but it looked so silly," says production designer Lilly Hilvert.

For all the efforts toward authenticity, The Crucible would never have worked if it weren't a unique creation, a preachy play that packs real drama. Miller wrote it as a gesture of defiance during the height of anti-Communist paranoia. Reviewers were quick to jump on the flaw in the metaphor: While there were Communists, no one had ever seen a witch. But in the end the play outlasted the critics, the red scares, and even the cold war itself.

"The play's application is toward really anything and any issue involving hysterical reactions," Miller says. He points to homophobia and the McMartin child-abuse trials as examples of current hysteria; Hytner notes parallels in the campus obsession with political correctness and date rape; Ryder, whose late godfather, Timothy Leary, was sent to prison for marijuana possession in the '60s, draws an analogy to draconian drug-sentencing laws. The play was particularly popular in China during the '80s and is widely performed right now in Latin America.

Still, the movie comes at a useful time for Miller, who has a poignantly split identity in America: icon and tough sell (his last Broadway play, 1994's Broken Glass, opened and closed in two months). "Arthur deals in ideas," says Hytner "and it's tough to put on a play of ideas in New York. Once he's had a Hollywood hit, people will be very interested in him again. They'll remember he's alive."

I repeat these words to Miller. "I'm not buried yet," he says. "In this business, the wind blows and nobody remembers what happened yesterday."

People, 20 January 1997

"Then shut the curtains," a somewhat incredulous Tomaiolo recalls telling her. "This is New England. People wouldn't stare if Elvis showed up."

Ryder listened politely--then posted a full-time security guard at the end of her driveway. And who can blame her? At 25 the star of The Crucible is entering her second decade as a movie actress who, among certain members of her generation, has an almost mythical status. What true fan doesn't know that she spent several childhood years on a commune in California? That her godfather was the late LSDguru Timothy Leary? And that, when she was 18, her first love, Johnny Depp, tattooed "Winona For-ever" on his arm? Depp may have moved on to model Kate Moss, and Ryder to an on-again, off-again romance with Soul Asylum lead singer Dave Pirner, 32, but the 5'4", 100-lb. star remains the focus of scrutiny--and not just from overeager admirers.

In November, in a story on CBS's 60 Minutes about the pervasiveness of smoking in Hollywood,former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano singled out Ryder as the role model who has done "more damage to young girls" than any other actress "because she does smoke all the time in every single movie she makes."

True, Ryder chain-puffed her way through Reality Bites, the 1994 hom-age to Generation X. But clearly Califano hadn't considered such smoke-free roles as 1990's Edward Scissor-hands or '93's The Age of Innocence--or '92's Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which the actress sucks lots of blood but not one cigarette. The fact is, whether smoking (an occasional off-camera habit), eating Eskimo Pies ("she eats every kind of junk food," Bites costar Janeane Garofalo once said) or telling dirty jokes (she was a corseted cutup while filming 1994's Little Women), Ryder leaves a lasting impression. Actor Bruce Davison recalls the first time he saw the then 19-year-old at the Golden Globe Awards: "She was just sitting there in a white satin dress, sipping a Coke. Ithought, `Wow, what an incredible beauty.' "

He was unnerved five years later to find himself on the set of The Crucible slapping that same beauty. As the Reverend Parris, Davison is called upon to smack Ryder's Abigail Williams, a young woman who seeks revenge after being scorned by Daniel Day-Lewis, her adulterous lover. "Winona says to me, `You'll be really careful, won't you?' " says Davison. But after several takes feigning the hit, the actor recalls that he accidentally "clipped her" on the ear. She finished the scene, then ran to her trailer. "I was beside myself, practically in tears," says Davison. After 20 minutes, Ryder came out and said, "It's okay. I can hear now and Ithink the scene is good now."

The assignment at hand is always what's paramount for Ryder, who, unlike many of her peers, has chosen roles with little regard for their starmaking potential. When she was 15, her agent begged her not to act in the morbid comedy Heathers. Ryder paid no attention. The movie achieved cult status, and her turn as a teen murderer proved her breakout role. Other films--last year's Boys, for instance--have been less successful. But her work ethic never wanes. "I don't know if we could have made Little Women if not for her interest," producer Denise DiNovi, who worked with Ryder on Heathers and Scissorhands, recently told PEOPLE. "I've become very dependent on her, asking her opinion on costumes, casting, even sets."

"She is very, very determined," adds Richard E. Grant, who appeared with Ryder in Dracula and The Age of Innocence. "Around the set she giggles like someone who has just come out of high school. But when the camera rolls, she doesn't screw around."

On Crucible that focus--and perhaps her innate shyness--led to misunderstandings. Locals who worked on the crew were put off by what they thought was Ryder's snobbery. While most of the others in the cast chatted freely and visited the town's shops, Ryder kept to herself. "She wanted to do her part and be left alone," says Edward Frisbie, who drove carriages and wrangled animals on the set. In time, though, he and others came to see Ryder's reserve as professionalism. "She was intent on what she was doing," says animal wrangler Drew Conroy. "It wasn't her job to mingle with people who tended sheep."

Indeed, what down time Ryder had she spent in her rented home, practicing lines in front of the fireplace, knitting and, for two weeks, playing house with Pirner. The two recently ended their three-year relationship, but they were cozy in Essex last year, wowing local kids (he handed out guitar picks as souvenirs) and hopping into a white limo to get takeout. A few dates last year with The X-Files' David Duchovny went nowhere, she said in last month's Vogue. And there is talk in Hollywood that she has reconciled with Pirner, who was with her at the Manhattan premiere of The Crucible in November. Says Ryder's pal Jay Cocks: "They looked very solid to me."

Back in Petaluma, Calif., where Ryder's family moved when she was 11, neighbors fondly recall the girl they knew as Noni. To Ann Peterson, owner of the Fourth Street Cutters salon, Ryder will always be the kid who wore her hair in a punk pixie cut and skateboarded with Peterson's sons. "She was a little offbeat," says Peterson. No surprise: The daughter of counterculture enthusiasts Michael and Cindy Horowitz was raised (along with brother Uri, now 20, and Sunyata, 29, and Jubal, 27, her half sister and brother from her mother's first marriage) to find her own way. She began studying acting at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater at 12, and at 14 appeared in her first film, the teen romance Lucas. Awed by her skills, Martin Hogue, her former drama teacher at Petaluma High, rarely ventured tips to the budding star. "I didn't feel I was competent to do it," he said.

Working on such films as 1988's Beetlejuice often kept her from class. But Ryder worked with a tutor, sent in her homework and graduated with an A average. Her parents had no problem with her unorthodox choices. Michael, 58, who now owns Flashback Books in Petaluma, and Cindy, 56, a video artist and filmmaker, were happy for her to skip class just to go see a good film. And at home she would chat with such family friends as Timothy Leary and poet Allen Ginsberg. As Leary told PEOPLE in 1990, "She was surrounded by thoughtful bohemic types."