The film costarred Christian Slater and Shannen Doherty. In 1990, she played a suburban cheerleader in Tim Burton’s gothic fantasy Edward Scissorhands (1990), costarring Johnny Depp. The same year Ryder appeared in Mermaids, featuring Cher, with whom Ryder lived briefly during the film’s production. Media reception of Mermaids was tepid, but Ryder was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a Best Supporting Actress Award from the National Board of Review for her role. As in the case of her performance in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (also 1990), she was singled out by critics as a bright talent.

Following this whirlwind of success, Ryder backed out of a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather III due to exhaustion. She also checked herself into a mental health facility to be treated for the depression and anxiety that she had been intermittently suffering from for years. However, within a week of her hospitalization, she decided that her treatment was not helping and opted to return to her home in San Francisco.

Ryder’s subsequent projects, such as the ensemble-filled Night on Earth (1991) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) fared moderately well; while Billie August’s The House of the Spirits (1993) (featuring an all-star cast including Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, and Jeremy Irons) flopped with critics and audiences alike. Ryder’s next film was a tremendous success, however. In Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Age of Innocence (1993), costarring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, she won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for an Academy Award. She was nominated for an Oscar again the following year for her lead role in Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (1994). Looking for Richard (1996), a film directed by Al Pacino—in which Ryder plays both herself and the politically targeted Lady Anne, was an art-house hit. She followed this with several projects, including The Crucible (1996), a film based on Arthur Miller’s play (also featuring her Age of Innocence co-star Day-Lewis); and Alien: Resurrection (1997), with Sigourney Weaver.

Girl, Interrupted (1999) garnered more attention for Angelina Jolie (who won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for her supporting role as an oversexed sociopath) than for Ryder, but her performance was nonetheless noteworthy.