Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder made her first film, Lucas, in 1986 at fourteen. Two years later Tim Burton cast her as Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice, and the following year Heathers gave her a black comedy about teenage murder that no studio would green-light today. By twenty she had been in Edward Scissorhands and had a Golden Globe nomination for Mermaids. It is a strange opening decade - almost nothing in it is conventional, and none of it looks like an attempt to be liked.

The dramatic work arrived quickly after that. Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, then The Age of Innocence in 1993, which brought a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 1994 she managed Reality Bites and Little Women in the same twelve months - one of them defining how a generation was marketed to itself, the other earning her a Best Actress nomination. She was twenty-three, with two Oscar nominations, and had been working for eight years.

Girl, Interrupted in 1999 closed the run. Then, in December 2001, she was arrested for shoplifting at a Beverly Hills department store, and in 2002 was convicted of grand theft and given three years' probation. The coverage was enormous and unusually cruel, and the work effectively stopped. She has since described simply checking out of the industry for a stretch she measures in years rather than months. Not a collapse exactly, but a withdrawal that lasted more than a decade.

Which makes her the clearest case on this site for what a then-and-now comparison actually measures. Stranger Things arrived in 2016 and cast her as a mother in a show built entirely out of the decade she had helped define - an almost impertinent piece of casting that worked. The face in the 1988 photographs and the face in the 2016 ones are recognisably the same person. What changed in between was the industry's willingness to look at her.