Christina Ricci

"If I haden't gone into acting, I would have been one of those weird runaways on Hollywood Boulevard. No it would be uglier, I'd probally be dead."-Movieline Magazine.
— Christina Ricci

WATCHING a child actor grow up can be a satisfying experience. Take Jodie Foster, for example, or Ron Howard. Then again, there are some child actors you wish had stayed children, like Lukas Haas or Macaulay Culkin. Too numerous to count are those who burned out, faded away, or became something wretched (e.g.: Danny Bonaduce). Christina Ricci shows every indication of being a shining example of the first kind of former kiddie actor. Breathtakingly precocious and yet continually charming, she has evolved from cutsey-pie girlhood through the awkward pre-teen years and gawky adolescence to become a strong and formidable young actress with a host of movies to her credit and a packed dance card into the future.

Born in sunny Santa Monica, Calif., to a lawyer-psychiatrist father and a real estate agent mother, Ricci was raised from the age of 7 in Montclair, N.J. The youngest of four children, she played the role of family clown, taking especial delight in making her older siblings laugh. Not long after the family relocated to the Northeast, Ricci starred in an elementary school pageant, The Twelve Days of Christmas. So impressive was her ingenuous performance that a local movie critic, who just so happened to be in the audience, convinced the Riccis to secure an agent's services for their obviously talented tot.

Only a year of doing commercial work passed before young Christina landed her career-launching role as Cher's youngest daughter in the wacky 1990 feature Mermaids. During filming Ricci formed bonds of friendship with both her cinematic mother, co-star Winona Ryder, and Ryder's then-boyfriend Johnny Depp, a frequent visitor to the set. Cher says that she and Ricci are still close pals, and credits the young actress with an astonishing maturity for her years. "We're kind of kindred spirits," explains Cher.

From Mermaids, the newcomer went on to a small part in The Hard Way (1991), and then to the role that made her famous: that of Wednesday Addams in director Barry Sonnenfeld's film adaptation of that spooky, kooky '60s comedy series The Addams Family. From then on, Ricci became a fast-rising star, going from film shoot to film shoot; as for her education, she engaged a tutor while working, and when not, she attended the exclusive Professional Children's School (fellow child actor Macaulay Culkin was one of her schoolmates).
Ricci completed an amazing amount of work over the next five years, and soon was negotiating the peril-ridden transition from kiddie movies to more serious parts in noteworthy films. Leading roles in Now and Then (1995) and Casper (1995), and subsequent junkets in The Secret of Bear Mountain (1996) and The Last of the High Kings (1996), led to a professional nadir when she starred in the limp 1997 remake of That Darn Cat. Musing on the change her career needed to undergo in order for her to survive it, she says, "I was convinced all I'd ever get offered were horrible movies like That Darn Cat. The Ice Storm changed all that."

Ricci has gone on to play other characters placed in sexually challenging or morally ambiguous situations. In Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66, she plays a young girl who is kidnapped and forced to masquerade as an ex-con's wife; in Don Roos's The Opposite of Sex, she is a horny young seductress who lures her gay uncle's boyfriend away from him; and she also filmed a cameo in Terry Gilliam's adaptation of the classic Hunter S. Thompson novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which starred Johnny Depp.

It seems that the young actress is dead-set on following a decidedly unconventional career path, one that eschews cotton-candy cinematic pit-stops altogether. Other offbeat projects include John Waters' Pecker, the story of a Baltimore deli employee who takes the New York art world by storm with photographs he's taken of his bizarre family; indie director Morgan J. Freeman's Desert Blue; and veteran casting director Risa Bramon Garcia's directorial debut feature 200 Cigarettes, in which Ricci co-starred with Courtney Love. She broke her string of quirky indies with the 1999 release of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, in which she starred as the inamorata of Depp's Ichabod Crane. The two actors will reteam a third time for writer-director Sally Potter's WWII drama The Man Who Cried, the story of a young female transient (Ricci) who enters the theater world when she meets a famous opera singer; the film will also star Robert De Niro, John Turturro, and the luminous Cate Blanchett. In addition to her mixed bag of forthcoming independent and big-studio features, Ricci has also formed her own production company and is working on writing screenplays.

Although a film veteran by any measure, Ricci, who was recently hailed as the Sundance "It" Girl, retains a healthy contempt for the Hollywood scene. Shunning the rampant insincerity of Los Angeles, she resides in New York, where she counts hanging out with friends and her boyfriend as the most important thing in her life beyond work. "I don't like that many people in this business," she admits. "They're too wrapped up in it. Everyone wants to schmooze and meet people. I hate that." Despite this ready scorn for the hobnobbing aspects of movie-making, the recalcitrant Ricci has nonetheless managed a successful crossing over from overworked teen star to seriously capable Hollywood professional.