Christina Ricci Biography

Having already been taught to read by her sister Pia, Christina would attend Edgemont Elementary School, a Montessori school on the edge of Edgemont Memorial Park. The Montessori method, based on self-directed activity on the part of the child and clinical observation from the teachers, would give the girl an early sense of independence. A notion of self-improvement would be instilled in her naturally by her family. Formerly a gym teacher, Ralph would train and set himself up as a therapist, then a lawyer and finally a drug counsellor while Sarah, in her youth a model for the Ford Agency (she sometimes stood in for Twiggy at fittings) would become an estate agent.

What Christina also got from her family, her father in particular, was a clear sense that all was not right. Later described by his daughter as "paranoid", he'd teach the kids to never trust anyone, that no one ever really likes you. By the time Christina was six they were all in family therapy. Therapy would feature strongly in the young girl's life as Ralph would work from home. Ordinarily this might see him treating his patients in a quiet study, but Ralph specialised in Primal Therapy, invented by Dr Arthur Janov and popularised by John Lennon. Popularly known as Primal Scream Therapy, this would see patients encouraged to exhibit their pain and trauma, usually vocally. Different methods had sprung up over the years, one being called "sluggo", where a doctor would mildly slap his patients to get the ball rolling, and this had led to harsher measures that could only be described as physical and sexual abuse. Ralph did not utilise such humiliations, nevertheless his patients' tortured howls would ring through the house, shattering his family's peace and eventually being taken as a joke. Christina, who'd already discovered a talent for making her siblings laugh, would act along to these cries of grief for the entertainment of all. A macabre form of role-playing, for sure, but ideal training for a future Wednesday Addams.

Beyond this, Ralph would be unable to leave his work in the office, constantly analysing Christina and the others, explaining to them why they were behaving as they were, pointing out their psychoses. It really wasn't healthy for a young child, but it did sweep away much of her childish naivety. This would help her when it came to her first breakthrough - at the age of seven. Keen to score a part in her school's production of The 12 Days Of Christmas she was turned down, but ruthlessly taunted one of the boys who had won a part, pushing him into hitting her. She then grassed him up and was awarded his place in the pageant. Job done. But there was more to come. During the actual performance Ricci needed to wee and began to jig comically about the stage, grabbing the attention of a writer from local newspaper the Bergen Record. The writer was, in fact, the mother of the boy Ricci had ousted but thankfully held no grudge, instead suggesting to Ricci's mother that the girl was cute and smart enough to score work in commercials. For her part, Sarah (who Christina would later describe as "fun, very silly, very vain") was not keen. As a pre-teen model herself she'd not been impressed with the way such kids were treated. Her other children, though, excited by the prospect, did not feel it was Sarah's decision to make; Christina should be allowed to choose her own path. More to please Rafael, Dante and Pia than through any ambition of her own, Christina agreed to give it a go.

Quickly ads would come, Christina promoting credit cards, dolls, curtains and Count Chocula and Franken Berry cereals. She'd make appearances and do voiceovers for a year, like her mother coming to enjoy the experience. Film and TV were now legitimate targets and almost immediately became a reality when, having missed out on the surprisingly good Pet Sematary to Blaze Berdahl, Christina found herself cast in her debut movie, Mermaids. This would see Cher star as a single mother of two girls, Winona Ryder and Ricci, who seeks a life out of the ordinary and, moving from one bad relationship to another, shifts her family from town to town. Now in Massachusetts, she must learn to accept the love of Ordinary Joe Bob Hoskins, while Ryder, a religious romantic endlessly embarrassed by her tarty mum, suffers the peaks and troughs of first love. Ricci, meanwhile, is on the outside looking in, an incredibly self-possessed presence for one so young. The movie opens with her in a swimming competition and later she attempts to break the world record for holding your breath underwater. Later still, she'd become the movie's centre when, made tipsy by Ryder, she stumbles towards tragedy. The film would be a hit and, though Ryder would gain most of the plaudits, Ricci would receive worldwide exposure, exposure boosted by her appearance dancing alongside Ryder and Cher in the video to Cher's Number One hit The Shoop Shoop Song. It was a positive experience all round for Ricci. She'd later confess that, to avoid her on-set tutor, she'd hidden in Cher's trailer, knowing that the teacher would be too star-struck to knock. The support of cast and crew also gave her a sense of self and of approval that she wasn't receiving at home. Up until this point, she said, she had not enjoyed her childhood at all. Soon before the film was released Ricci would make a TV debut in an episode of the short-lived series HELP where John Mahoney would play the leader of the Harlem Eastside Lifesaving Programme, a team of cops, firemen and paramedics carrying out daring rescues. Ricci's future co-star Greg Germann would also make an appearance, as would Wesley Snipes and David Caruso.

Ricci's impressive maturity would rapidly be noted by Hollywood and 1991 would see her appear in two major productions. The first of these would be The Hard Way where Michael J Fox's pampered film star, desperate for respect, is inspired by TV coverage of tough New York cop James Woods to take on a Serpico-style role. For research he uses his influence to wangle a temporary spot as partner to Woods himself, much to Woods' foul-mouthed chagrin, and joins him in the hunt for serial killer The Party Crasher. Ricci would appear in just two scenes, the first coming when she accompanies mum Annabella Sciorra on a date with Woods in a pizza parlour. It's not going well. Sciorra is attacking Woods for his failure to communicate, he's exasperated and defensive. Ricci, meanwhile, her head just visible above the counter, is a picture of suspicion, trusting Woods not one jot. Both she and Sciorra, though are charmed when Fox butts in, breaking the tension and building a party atmosphere, the fun lasting only until Woods decides the crack the heads of the bunch of rowdy drunks. It was a brief scene, but notable in that the tiny, almost totally inexperienced Ricci held her own when the patter was at its fiercest, Woods, Fox and Sciorra being no slouches when it comes to fast-paced, highly emotive dialogue. The little girl did not miss a beat. In her second scene she'd be called upon to do precisely nothing as she sits beside Woods and Sciorra at the premiere of Fox's movie as Woods is outraged by Fox's purloining of his life and all his best lines. Though in all it was a small part, it was important to Ricci in relation to her future career. For years she would cite the maverick Woods as one of her favourite actors and could not help but notice the way Woods had always sought out challenging work, from Holocaust and Videodrome, through Salvador and The Boost through to The Virgin Suicides, never shying from controversy or Hollywood disapproval. She'd also state that she aimed to make the same kind of career choices as John Malkovich.

If ever a film came along at the right time for an actress, it was The Addams Family for Ricci. Tiny, big-eyed and notably intelligent, she was perfect for the role of Wednesday, the taciturn daughter, obsessed with gloom and death. Though the central plot would see a gang of con-men try to nab the Addams fortune through a Fester impersonator, Ricci and Jimmy Workman's Pugsley would deliver some of the film's finer moments, perhaps because such grotesque behaviour is all the funnier when committed by children. Ricci would be at her early best when pursuing her brother with a selection of sharp implements and curiously wondering whether Girl Scout cookie are really made of Girl Scouts.

The Addams Family was a big hit in 1991, and Ricci would gain yet more kudos when on December 7th she joined Workman on Saturday Night Live when MC Hammer performed his hit Addams Groove. Of course she'd stay with the franchise for its second outing, Addams Family Values, released in 1993. This time the central story saw evil nanny Joan Cusack attempt to seduce Fester, but the producers and director Barry Sonenfeld had wisely recognised Ricci's comic potential and brought her to the fore. At first she and her brother are threatening their mother Anjelica Huston's new baby, Pubert (Pugsley: "We don't hate him. We just want to play with him". Wednesday: "Especially his head"), then they're sent off to create chaos at a summer camp ruled by a remorselessly chirpy Peter MacNicol, later to star alongside Ricci in Ally McBeal. Reacting against MacNicol's bigotry towards all nerds, fatties and outsiders, Ricci sabotages the camp's Thanksgiving pageant, as Pocahontas leading a violent raid on the nice-guy pilgrims. "And for all these reasons", she says after listing their iniquities "I have decided to scalp you".

Though the film was roundly superior to its predecessor its box office was far lower, effectively killing the franchise. But the movies had already done their work in introducing Ricci's precocious talent. 1993 would also see her pop up in The Cemetery Club where Jewish widows Ellen Burstyn, Olympia Dukakis and Diane Ladd would have plenty to say when Burstyn finds new love with Danny Aiello. The film would also feature an early and uncredited appearance by Catherine Keener, playing Burstyn's daughter. Fittingly Ricci, the new goth superstar, would share scenes with Burstyn, star, of course, of The Exorcist.

In some respects life was good for Ricci. She loved the work, both play-acting and being on a level footing with adults. She liked the attention and the toys afforded by the big wage-cheques. However, home life had become increasingly difficult, with Ralph and Sarah's relationship breaking down. There was no violence, but a lot of shouting and emotional chaos. With her siblings all at college, the 13-year-old Ricci bore the brunt of it alone and, having gone through family therapy, would begin an individual course that would continue on and off throughout her teens and twenties It was a tremendous relief when Ralph left, but this did not improve her relationship with her father. She'd see him until she was 15, then cut ties altogether.

Ricci's success had made school life difficult, too. She did not find it easy to move from being the special one on film sets to one of many in a classroom, and this despite having enrolled at Glenfield Middle School. Glenfield, some two miles from Edgemont, was a performing arts magnet school, teaching the usual subjects but also encouraging students to express themselves with paint, sound, body movement, clay, voice and film. They'd be taught the demands of artistry, the process of rehearsal, craft, reflection, remaking and doubt. It was useful for Ricci but could never have matched her working life for excitement. The rest of her school career would be bitty and confused, constantly interrupted by filming. She'd briefly attend Montclair High, where former pupils included Buzz Aldrin and Alex "Bill" Winter, and the Morristown-Beard School, a prestigious college prep school some 15 miles west of Montclair (Morristown was actually George Washington's HQ during the American Revolution), then would finally, in the summer of 1995, move with her mother into Manhattan, where she'd attend the Professional Children's School at 132 West 60th St. This school would offer a flexible but concentrated education to kids preparing for or already pursuing careers in the performing arts. Such greats as Sidney Lumet, Ida Lupino, Christopher Walken, Elliott Gould and Diane Lane had passed through its doors, another recent graduate being Sarah Michelle Gellar. Ricci would share classes with child star Macauley Culkin and make great friends with Gaby Hoffmann, who'd already appeared in Uncle Buck and Field Of Dreams.

Ricci would work for three months of the year, her school giving lesson plans to an on-set tutor. Ricci would ask for the same teacher each time as, with her, they could race through lessons then concentrate on subjects that interested the girl, like philosophy or Italian.. Yet still there were problems. Self-mutilation was, as ever, common among Ricci's teenage peers and she herself took to cutting herself with bottle-tops and, more often, burning herself with cigarettes and lighters. Worse would follow as she moved through her teens and became a sexual presence on-screen. The studios became interested in her size, as did the media. Questions were constantly asked, the studios claiming that audiences liked that drawn Wednesday look, the pressure quickly pushing Ricci towards anorexia.

Ricci would first begin to suffer from anorexia on the set of her next shoot. Living on salad, she'd slip to six stone, only being aided by therapy and her sister, Pia. Still shy, her co-stars would inadvertently give her cause to believe she was too short and far from adequately pretty. Added to this was her disappointment in having been beaten to plum roles in Little Women and Interview With The Vampire by the blonde and beautiful Kirsten Dunst. The movie was Now And Then, originally called Gaslight Addition, a contrived coming of age tale where old friends Melanie Griffith, Demi Moore, Rita Wilson and Rosie O'Donnell would gather to help Wilson through her pregnancy, the story flashing back 25 years to 1970 when they were kids, their younger selves being played by Thora Birch, Gaby Hoffmann, Ashleigh Aston Moore and Ricci respectively. Ricci would be a tomboy, taping down her breasts as she joins the others in building treehouses, riding bikes, discussing boys and seeking the truth behind a mysterious name on a gravestone. With Moore, Griffith and Lolita Davidovich in the adult cast, the glamour count was high. Competition amongst the kids was also fierce, and Ricci understood that she was not intended to be the pretty girl in the crew. She would thankfully soon come to realise that pretty girls come and go, while actors of substance remain. Also, her arrival at the Professional Children's School would help as she'd be surrounded by normal people rather than LA perfection. Though she'd balloon after her anorexia, she'd soon find a reasonable balance.

After The Addams Family movies, Ricci's spooky rep made her a shoo-in for the lead in Casper, another cartoon brought to the big screen. Here wicked Cathy Moriarty would inherit a haunted manor house and need, in order to find the treasure supposedly hidden within, to clear the place of spectres. To do so, she'd hire Bill Pullman, a psychiatrist who helps spirits find peace, and his daughter, Ricci, would make friends with the friendly ghost of the title, all of them battling against the mischievous sprites Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso. She'd also get to kiss Devon Sawa, as she had done in Now And Then. For the first time Ricci would be expected to carry the movie and, despite having to act against nothing, would not be overshadowed by some fine special effects. With the movie breaking the $100 million barrier, she was now the child star of the moment. But such prime roles were not common and Ricci's next outing, Gold Diggers: The Secret Of Bear Mountain would be far more predictable, being along the lines of a standard Nancy Drew mystery. Here Ricci would play a city kid transplanted to a small town and befriending tomboy Anna Chlumsky. Hearing legends of gold hidden in the hills, the girls go seeking and fall foul of Chlumsky's mother's drunken boyfriend, who kidnaps Chlumsky while Ricci runs for help and initiates a rescue mission.

Gold Diggers was a movie most teen actresses would have been pleased to secure. Yet for Ricci it seemed more a blip in an increasingly interesting CV. Already she was out partying, enjoying the trappings of fame, getting her early twenties out of the way before she hit 16; already she was seeking to work with the film world's more independent minds. 1996 would see her first moves towards screen adulthood. Having lent her voice to an episode of The Simpsons, the last of Season 7 where she'd play a new holiday friend of an unpopular Lisa, she'd be hired by her Addams Family mum Anjelica Huston to appear in her directorial debut, the 1950s-set Bastard Out Of Carolina. Based on Dorothy Allison's book, this was a controversial tale of child battery and rape, where Jennifer Jason Leigh would play a poor single mother torn between her loves for an abusive Ron Eldard and her daughter Jena Malone (another Professional Children's School contemporary of Ricci's). Ricci would appear briefly as Malone's cousin, far more sophisticated as she drives, wears lipstick, smokes and explains the ways of men to her small-town relative. The movie would be offered to mogul Ted Turner and turned down (the wimpy Turner would reject David Cronenberg's Crash around the same time), but would consequently be snapped up by Showtime and proceed to garner four Emmy nominations. Far less fraught would be The Last Of The High Kings, written by actor Gabriel Byrne. Set in Dublin in 1977, this would see 17-year-old Jared Leto fantasising over local girls Lorraine Pilkington and Emily Mortimer and planning a beach party inspired by Elvis movies. It was a colourful snap-shot of Ireland and a reasonably charming rites of passage tale, Leto having to choose between losing his virginity and doing the right thing. A little over-whimsical, it desperately needed Ricci's input as a visiting American girl who shocks Leto with her frank attitudes to sex.

Ricci's next release, a short take on the Little Red Riding Hood story, might easily have descended into whimsy, too. At it turned out, it was far, far from that. Narrated by Quentin Crisp and shot in lustrous black and white, this would see Ricci passing through the woods on the way to granny's, and meeting the wolf, played by a hirsute Timour Bourtasenkov of the Carolina Ballet, who reveals his desire with his huge eyes and erotic dance stretches. Racing on ahead, he kills gran and gets into bed, persuading an arriving Ricci to strip off and get in beside him. Though recognising the sexual and physical danger, she teases him and, pausing only to taste the flesh of her grandma, leads him back through the trees to her house, where she may, or may not, let him in. It was a wonderful expressionist oddity, both sexy and beautiful, though slightly marred by some pointless toilet humour tossed in by writer/director David Kaplan. It certainly showed Ricci was keen to embrace the unusual, even the offensive, as did her enthusiasm for the lead in a remake of Lolita, which would have placed her alongside Jeremy Irons and her former co-star Melanie Griffith. Ricci would be turned down four times.

Naturally, though Bastard Out Of Carolina and Little Red Riding Hood showed that Ricci was yearning to move rapidly into adult cinema, she was still recognised as a saleable product in the kids market. Thus she was hired as the lead in a remake of That Darn Cat, a hit back in 1965 with Hayley Mills. Here she played Patti Randall, a smart and sarcastic small town kid, not unlike Wednesday Addams, who likes to wear black (because "it matches my soul") and is always ready with a withering retort. When kidnappers nab a millionaire's maid their victim signals for help by writing on the collar of a passing moggie, Ricci's moggie. Ricci contacts the FBI and so she and agent Doug E Doug are drawn into a mayhemic series of chases and explosions. It was above average kids' fare but Ricci, still only 17, was tired of such work and would later be perhaps overly scathing when asked about such early work as That Darn Cat and Casper. Mind you, in interviews at the time she was scathing about pretty much everything. Later describing her teenage self as "guarded, sarcastic, hard and obnoxious", she was easily bored by the repetitious nature of press junkets and would entertain herself by laying into anything she considered lame, like the works of JD Salinger, and crack jokes on subjects many would consider taboo, such as incest. Dopily, perhaps cynically disregarding the fact that they were dealing with a bright 17-year-old and not Lucretia Borgia, the prurient press jumped on her on numerous occasions, causing readers to view her as a lunatic pervert. Of course many more saw her candour and humour as genuinely refreshing, Ricci fast becoming something of a cult heroine.

After That Darn Cat (which she herself described as "cheesy" and "pathetic"), Ricci would purposefully move into a run of releases that better suited her own outlook, deliberately destroying her reputation as a bankable star in the kids' genre. First would come Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, set in an affluent Connecticut suburb in 1973. Kevin Kline's having an affair his neighbour Sigourney Weaver, his wife Joan Allen's shoplifting to relieve the tedium and his kids are experimenting with drugs and sex. Utterly self-obsessed, he doesn't realise that his daughter Ricci, sharp-tongued and cold, is getting high, racing around in a Richard Nixon mask and seducing both Elijah Wood and his little brother. With the Sixties having erased moral guidelines everyone's free to do what they will and no one's having fun. Tellingly, according to Ricci, this was the first role she ever really wanted, pursued and got.

Ricci would move on to rejoin Anjelica Huston in Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66. Here writer and director Gallo would be jailed for his illegal attempts to raise cash to pay off his gambling debts and, on his release, p to kill the football kicker whose miss cost him so dearly. On his way to visit his parents, Huston and Ben Gazzara, he'd kidnap dance student Ricci and order her to act as his wife when they arrive at the parental home. This she does with some aplomb. Slutty but smart she hurls herself into the role, winning over the parents with her enthusiasm and putting Gallo, who's hoping for some kind of cathartic reconciliation himself, deep in the shade. Ever gallant, Gallo would later pile in to Ricci, claiming that she had been drunk on-set, had been binging on cough mixture and had lost 17 pounds because he'd forced her to stop over-eating. She was, he added with great chivalry, "an ungrateful c***". Others might see Gallo as the ingrate, as it was Ricci's performance that raised his movie above the level of mere vanity project. Her next effort would see her again as a crazy teen. This was Terry Gilliam's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, based on Hunter S Thompson's drug-fuelled epic from 1971 and featuring former Ricci co-stars Tobey Maguire and Lyle Lovett, from The Ice Storm and Bastard Out Of Carolina respectively. Here Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro would visit Vegas for a motorcycle race and get utterly bombed, hallucinating wildly as the drugs bring the desert and the casinos to other-worldly life. Ricci would hook up with them briefly, adding more madness as a teenage runaway, depressed and deranged, who's trying to sell her portraits of Barbra Streisand.

Having graduated from the Professional Children's School, Ricci would apply for a writing course at Columbia University and be accepted, but would not take her place. For her the offer was enough to prove she had the brains for it, and claimed to loathe the notion that actresses who chose to finish their academic career were necessarily brighter than the rest. Besides, the work was coming thick and fast, and it was good work, too. Her next movie would be Don Roos' hilarious The Opposite Of Sex, again with Lyle Lovett, where she'd play a monumentally self-serving teen who leaves home and lands herself on her gay half-brother, a teacher. First she seduces his boyfriend, then convinces the poor fool he's the father of her baby, dragging all the men around her into a crazy cycle of blackmail, betrayal and theft. Voicing-over from the start, she makes it clear to us that she is not a good person, that it will not turn out all right in the end, yet still we're shocked by the depths of her deceit. She was quite masterfully unpleasant and would be rewarded with a Golden Globe nomination.

Ricci was ubiquitous in 1998. After Buffalo 66, Fear And Loathing and The Opposite Of Sex there was still much more to come. In Small Soldiers, a darker take on the recent hit Toy Story, a military experiment where micro chips were added to some children's action figures would go horribly wrong, causing toy commandos to wage war against some cute fantasy figures, the conflict taking place in a young boy's house. It was fast, fun and a lot like director Joe Dante's earlier Gremlins, one of the best sequences coming when the boy's neighbour, played by Ricci's recent nemesis Kirsten Dunst, was kidnapped by Barbie-type dolls, twisted mentally and physically when the commandos do some experiments of their own. Ricci would have great fun voicing one of these evil dollies, as would Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ricci's near-contemporary at the Professional Children's School.

It seemed only fitting that Ricci should now join up with arch-maverick John Waters for Pecker. Here Edward Furlong would star as a Baltimore sandwich-maker whose snaps of the seedier side of life see him rocketed to fame as an art-house photographer. Ricci would play his girlfriend, who runs a laundromat and is obsessed with stains. On one occasion, believing that Furlong has betrayed her with Lili Taylor, she's devastated and slips into a voting booth to hide her grief. Furlong follows her, proves his innocence and they end up having manic sex. It was that kind of film, one of Waters' weaker efforts, designed to shock and failing on almost every count. Better, though not by much, would be Desert Blue where professor John Heard and his frustrated starlet daughter Kate Hudson are stranded in a tiny Californian town, known only for its defunct water-park and a 60ft model ice cream cone. The main story would have the FBI show up, block off the roads and quarantine the town due to some occurrence at a mysterious nearby factory, thought to produce cola. But the real interest came from interactions between the town's bored teenagers, two of them being played by Casey Affleck and Brendan Sexton III, who'd just appeared with Ricci in Pecker. Ricci herself would be the chairwoman of the bored, a sheriff's daughter who has taken to blowing things up and hopes to escape the town by one day dying in an explosion.

Ricci would end an extraordinary year with a cameo in I Woke Up Early The Day I Died. Produced by and starring Billy Zane, this was based on the last script written by the infamously incompetent Ed Wood and would feature such oddballs as Eartha Kitt, Karen Black, Bud Cort, Maila "Vampira" Nurmi and Carel Struyeken, who'd played Lurch to Ricci's Wednesday Addams. Here Zane would play The Thief, a cross-dressing nutter who escapes from an asylum, robs a loans office, loses the money at a funeral and spends the rest of the movie hunting and killing the mourners. Sensitive to noise, he'll often collapse into the foetal position. Directed by fashion photographer and painter Aris Iliopulos, the movie had no dialogue, just background noise and discordant music, but was fascinating nonetheless, with Zane deliberately and successfully hamming it up. Ricci would appear only briefly as a buxom young hooker in tatty fur who picks Zane up and, drawing him into an erotic dance, feels him up and lifts his wallet, only to be caught out and promptly ejected. She didn't have to do much, just turn Zane on, fear a beating then flee in disappointment and relief, but she did it well.

1999 would begin with Ricci still resolutely offbeat. 200 Cigarettes would follow a string of youngsters as they plan and make their way to a New York party in 1981, meeting, worrying, getting drunk, getting lost, having sex and splitting up as they go. Martha Plimpton, who'd appeared in Pecker, would be giving the party, Kate Hudson from Desert Blue would be a nice girl who's lost her virginity to Jay Mohr, while Elvis Costello and Casey Affleck, also from Desert Blue, would also feature. Ricci would appear alongside her friend and former schoolmate Gaby Hoffmann as two suburban Long Island airheads, squawking, screeching girls on the town who fall in with a gang of punk rockers. Following this would come No Vacancy, a take on 1995's Four Rooms concerning the lives and loves of the residents of a Hollywood motel. Lolita Davidovich, Ricci's co-star in Now And Then would feature, as would Robert Wagner, with Ricci starring as a young woman who, having split up with her faithless fiance, wakes up next to hunky Tim Olyphant who's drunkenly wandered into her room and spent the night. She's outraged by events, furniture-shatteringly outraged, but gradually they fall for one another and end up having sex on top of a refrigerator. Off-set, Ricci would begin to date not Olyphant but actor Matthew Frauman.

Ricci's final movie of 1999 was an important one, so important that it forced her to turn down the Sarah Polley role in the excellent Go. Since her days as a child star she'd made some excellent movies and proved herself to be an actress of both pedigree and potential. However, big budget films seemed to always pass her by. Where before she'd been a money-spinner, now studios considered her too edgy, too unpredictable, a loose cannon. This would change with Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, another chance to appear alongside Johnny Depp. Packed with charismatic outsiders like Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson and Christophers Lee and Walken it seemed an ideal home for Ricci, but even then producer Scott Rudin, who'd worked with her on the Addams Family movies, had to vouch for her mental health. The result was a fantasy classic with Depp a newfangled detective sent to a gothic New England village to solve a series of gruesome murders. Ricci would play Katrina Von Tassel, daughter of rich landowner Gambon, betrothed to Casper Van Dien but drawn to Depp. She seems helpful and flirty but may well be a witch casting spells to hinder the investigation and endanger Depp's life. The love interest role was hardly a test for her, the film's really meaty female part was Richardson's, but she'd acquitted herself well in a $100 million hit and was back on the Hollywood map - important as she would soon be seeking finance for her own projects. She'd furthermore reveal a talent for sketch comedy when hosting a Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live. Here she'd deliver a monologue where Rachel Dratch would claim to be her twin Petina, and she'd appear as an unruly punk alongside Ana Gasteyer's Sally Jesse Raphael, claming to love drugs and sex with old men and accidentally punching Gasteyer on the nose. Best of all, she'd perform a wicked impersonation of Britney Spears, saying that this was the time of year when "we as Christians take time out to think about forgiving our Jewish friends for killing our Lord". Naturally, there was an almighty furore afterwards. Typical Ricci. Just returned to the Hollywood fold, she was stirring it up again.

The new Millennium would bring Bless The Child, the latest in a long line of satanic cult movies. Here Rufus Sewell would run a rehab/self-empowerment group called New Dawn, actually a front for Devil-worshippers, and take control of an autistic 6-year-old prodigy he believes to be the agent of God. The kid, he feels, must be turned bad, or at least killed. On the trail, though, are the kid's aunt, Kim Basinger and FBI agent Jimmy Smits, Ricci popping up as a junkie and escaped cult member who points Basinger in the direction of Sewell and meets a genuinely horrible end. Far more impressive would be The Man Who Cried, written and directed by Sally Potter of Orlando fame, a third outing with Johnny Depp. Here Ricci would play a Russian Jew, adopted by Brits when her father takes off to make his fortune in America. Seeking to follow him, she takes a job as a showgirl in Paris and is taken under the wing of ambitious dancer Cate Blanchett, who begins an affair with opera star John Turturro and gets Ricci work at the opera. Here Ricci meets gypsy Depp and finds joy with this beautiful vagabond, coming alive in his arms and amidst the musicians of the gypsy camp. Then the Nazis approach and Jews and gypsies have much to fear. It was highly romantic, with Depp and Blanchett at their most attractive and, as ever, Potter delivered a series of stunning images. Depp and Ricci having rough sex in a shabby armchair on wasteland: Ricci bobbing in burning water: Depp and Ricci having rough sex under the stage as Turturro performs: Blanchett in a pool on a ship, swimming underwater when a torpedo strikes - unforgettable stuff. Ricci would look fabulous, too, in expensive period gear, dealing convincingly with loss, betrayal and shifting dreams. She would, though, she said, find it strange to be making love to Depp, who she saw more as an older brother.

Ricci would again look fantastic in her next release, a video for Moby's Natural Blues single. Here an aged Moby would sit in a dirty, damp and depressing hospital, watching footage of his younger, happier self on TV. Ricci would then appear to him as an angel, white-clad and beatific, and carry him backwards through the hospital and back through his life, finally raising a baby above her head. She'd be far from angelic in her next picture, All Over The Guy, featuring Adam Goldberg and her Opposite Of Sex co-stars Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky (the movie was actually produced by The Opposite Of Sex's director, Don Roos, Ricci taking the part by way of thanks). Here Goldberg and Sasha Alexander would decide to set up their gay friends Bucatinsky and Richard Ruccolo, then fall for each other, the movie being a complex rom-com. Ricci would appear briefly as Bucatinsky's cynical sister, a hip bad girl, whose opinions are not entirely helpful. Playing a sarcastic sophisticate was hardly a push, and the money was poor, but Ricci did at least, having for a while dated theatre actor James Oliver, come away with a new boyfriend in Goldberg.

Amazingly, given she was still only 21, Ricci's next film would bring her a co-production credit as she'd battled hard to put together a cinema version of Elizabeth Wurtzel's autobiographical bestseller Prozac Nation. Here Ricci would star as a young woman wracked by depression, a high achiever who tries to escape her overprotective mother Jessica Lange and makes it first to Harvard then on to Rolling Stone. She cannot escape, however, the black dog on her tail and, destroying her friendship with Michelle Williams and love with Jason Biggs, cannot see the damage she does to herself and others. It was heavy going, uncompromising and powerful with a fraught central performance from Ricci, though it did possess elements of dark comedy. Ricci, understanding this character well, would give a lot of herself to a role that demanded she blow Williams' boyfriend, attempt suicide and freak out on a daily basis. She'd even allow herself to be filmed topless. Such was the emotional cost that, sharing a Vancouver flat with Williams throughout filming, she'd go out nightly to get drunk and leave the rigours of the day far behind. Despite all her efforts, though, producer Harvey Weinstein, perhaps feeling the post-9/11 climate was not right for such angsty material, held the movie back. Then he held it back some more, never allowing it a cinema release and only releasing it to TV in 2005 when the Weinsteins left Miramax and released a backlog of 20 movies in seven months. To add salt to this wound, Ghost World was a cool success on release. Ricci had been originally slated to play the lead but pre-production had taken so long she'd grown too old for the role and had been replaced by Thora Birch, Ricci's co-star in Now And Then. Ricci had also turned down the lead in O, a high school-set take on Othello, due to her workload. To make matters even worse, Ricci's next picture would also be buried by the Weinsteins, not seeing the light of day till it was released on DVD in 2007. This was The Gathering where an ancient church was discovered underground in an English village. Ricci would play an American drifter who's run down by the family of Kerry Fox and taken to their home to recuperate and recover her memory. Now she starts having weird visions that come true and a centuries-old curse is revealed.

A fairly predictable psychological thriller, The Gathering was a weak entry on Ricci's CV but only the first of four scheduled releases in a busy 2002. Second was The Laramie Project, based on a play by Moises Kaufman, itself based on interviews with folk from the Wyoming town where in 1998 a gay man, Matthew Shepard, was tied to a fence, beaten and left to die. The interviews had taken place during Shepard's hospitalization, after his death and then during the trial and consequent media furore and the film, which had the characters speak one by one, was as much about the town and it was the murder. Ricci would take the part of a lesbian shopgirl, a friend and confidante of Shepard's, who organises candlelit vigils and protests, as well as the funeral where mourners dress as angels. Featuring the worthy likes of Laura Linney, Peter Fonda, Jeremy Davis, Steve Buscemi and Joshua Jackson, the movie was complex and harrowing, but rewarding, winning four Emmy nominations.

Having earlier formed Blaspheme Films with her sister Pia, Ricci now moved on to her second production, Pumpkin, yet another controversial release. Here Ricci would play the keenest member of a top-notch sorority house that decides to coach special needs children in order to gain extra credits. Ricci is assigned a kid nicknamed Pumpkin, both physically and mentally challenged, a discus thrower who can't really throw, or even stand, but practises constantly. Though embarrassed at first, Ricci comes to know and even love Pumpkin, recognising that in many ways he's less retarded than her tennis champ boyfriend. But when she's caught in bed with him, his mother accuses her of sluttery and even paedophilia. Featuring Brenda Blethyn, Marisa Coughlan and Harry J Lennix, it was a brave film, questioning the morals and motives of all its protagonists, and demanding that the disabled be treated neither with pity nor as saints. Unfortunately, its lack of success and the sad fate of Prozac Nation meant that Blaspheme would not produce another movie for some considerable time. There'd be further disappointment when Ricci failed to win a role in Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York.

Ricci's next movie, the Channel 4 production Miranda, would see her return yet again to England. Here she'd play a slinky American who shows up one day in the small library run by Elvis-loving Yorkshireman John Simm. She promptly seduces him then disappears, leading the besotted Simm into a plot she's hatched with mentor John Hurt to dupe millionaire Kyle MacLachlan. In blue lenses and dominatrix gear she'd make a convincing temptress but again the producers would have problems with distribution, the film being delayed then given only a very limited release. Though Ricci was working hard and well it looked to audiences as if she'd completely disappeared. Given that much of her fine recent work had been shelved, Ricci now went for guaranteed exposure by taking prime time TV parts. First she'd make a cameo in Malcolm In The Middle, in an episode where Malcolm's dad Hal is fearing having to meet his new boss as he always makes a bad first impression. To prove his point we flash back to earlier disasters, one being a company picnic where Ricci plays the boss's daughter. Hal falls over the food table, clutches at Ricci's necklace and drags her to the floor, in the commotion Ricci getting a toothpick stuck in her eye. Her other TV appearance of 2002 would be less hilarious but far more substantial. This was a 7-episode run in Ally McBeal where she'd play the young, bitchy and fearsome attorney Liza Bump. To defeat her in a wrongful dismissal case, McBeal's firm is forced to bring back Peter MacNicol, earlier Ricci's co-star in Addams Family Values. A real cow, Ricci would try to seduce MacNicol to win her case, then agree to settle and drop her offer at the last. Subsequently hired by McBeal's firm, she'd attempt to take over the office, hiring her own lawyers and then beginning a relationship with boss Greg Germann, all the while sparring cattily with Portia de Rossi. Sadly for McBeal fans, these were the last seven episodes, with the show now being canned. Happily for Ricci they allowed her to strut her stuff then walk. The same year she'd make another notable TV appearance when appearing in a Gap ad, playing pool-side chess with Dennis Hopper. In cool black and white, it was directed by the Coen Brothers.

The increased exposure given by Ally McBeal would continue in 2003 with a prime part in Woody Allen's Anything Else. Here Jason Biggs, earlier Ricci's tortured boyfriend in Prozac Nation, would play a wannabe comedy writer, a younger Allen, mentored by Allen himself. Beginning a relationship with neurotic actress Ricci, he's soon in trouble as Ricci appears to be using him, first to practise scenes then to accommodate her mad mum Stockard Channing. Sexy but supremely manipulative Ricci would bomb out their anniversary, ban Biggs from sex and, when he protests that she doesn't love him, innocently reply "Just because when you touch me I pull away?" When Allen informs Biggs she's cheating on him he begins to spy on her and it all gets messy. It's a cinematic rule that each Woody Allen release is described by someone somewhere as a return to form. Ricci's sultry efforts guaranteed that this one would be, too.

The remainder of 2003 would see two very different Ricci offerings. The first had her deliver a brief cameo in her boyfriend Adam Goldberg's film industry satire I Love Your Work. Here Giovanni Ribisi would play a hot young actor, married to fellow star Franka Potente and living the dream of drugs, sex and VIP parties. Gradually, though, it all begins to unravel. His marriage and life disintegrate and he comes to believe that videostore clerk Joshua Jackson, who'd earlier appeared in Ricci's The Laramie Project, is stalking him. In his obsession he becomes a stalker himself, Ricci appearing as a sweet former girlfriend, a symbol of the life Ribisi might have had before his narcissistic personality disorder took over.

It was interesting that Ricci should be cast as a sweetie, however briefly, by the person who actually lived with her. Having started out being cast as a smart and spooky kid, she was now often being hired as a vamp. She'd play a seductress in her next movie, too, but this was a serious step outside the norm, Monster being no ordinary film. In it Ricci would play a young girl keen to escape her controlling father and to experiment with lesbianism. In a bar she meets Charlize Theron, a hooker with dreams but no future. Theron reacts badly to Ricci's advances, thinking she just wants sex, but she soon mellows and the pair begin a relationship. Ricci is just playing, looking for fun and for Theron to look after her. Theron, though, falls hard and, seeking a normal, decent life with her new belle, goes looking for work. With no qualifications she has no chance and so is forced back onto the game, with disastrous consequences both for her and her tricks. Playing the real-life killer Aileen Wuornos, Theron would be superb, picking up an Oscar, yet Ricci was a vital foil. Cute but manipulative, vulnerable but demanding and passive-aggressive, too selfish to see the results of her selfishness, she made sense of Theron's actions and thus of the whole film.

As if reacting to the psychological grimness of Monster, Ricci's next few roles would be far less loaded. Returning to TV, she'd appear in an episode of Joey, Matt LeBlanc's follow-up to Friends, playing Joey's self-obsessed sister Mary Teresa. Visiting California prior to her wedding, she discovers her engagement ring is false and decides to stick around, nicking her brother's credit card and generally digging for gold. Joey must plot to get her to return to New York City. Following this would come a guest spot on Beck's Guero album, Ricci performing on the track Hell, Yes, then there'd be Cursed, a reunion of Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, the director and writer of the hugely successful Scream. This time they were taking on the werewolf myth, with Ricci and her brother Jesse Eisenberg being bitten and, in the time-honoured tradition, gradually becoming beasts themselves. Eisenberg is rather keen on his new powers and his newfound attractiveness, but Ricci's not happy with her antisocial appetites and yearns for her old life with boyfriend Joshua Jackson, formerly her co-star in The Laramie Project and I Love Your Work. She must find the werewolf who bit her, and everyone's a suspect. Also featuring Ricci's Ally McBeal sparring partner Portia de Rossi, Cursed was let down by its dodgy special effects and wimpy storyline. Indeed Craven and Williamson would both distance themselves from the movie when it was re-edited to gain a younger audience. Yet again Ricci had been undone by the powers that be.

2006 would be a better year, with a rush of Ricci releases. First she'd appear in a double episode of the hospital-set series Grey's Anatomy where, being Ricci, she'd take part in some outlandishly macabre antics. As paramedic Hannah Davies, she's dealing with a man with a gaping hole in his stomach. Reaching inside she discovers there's a bomb in there and now she has a problem. If she takes her hand out he bleeds, if she leaves it in, well . . . A doctor pumping air into the body hands her the pump and legs it, the hospital's evacuated. Ricci's surrounded by several brave surgeons and a bomb squad, all trying to keep her calm and failing as she moves ever closer to bolting. It was both enthralling and silly, a fine example of Ricci's black, black humour.

Her next outing would be twisted, too, though not to such a degree. This was Penelope, a modern-day fairy tale, where Ricci would pay a rich young woman cursed with a pig's nose until the day she can find a man who loves her faithfully. All her suitors prove unworthy, particularly James McAvoy, who's been paid by a newsman to take pictures of her. Fleeing out into the real world, she finds a friend in Reese Witherspoon (who co-produced) and comes to find herself, the rest following on naturally. Ricci's parents would be played by Richard E Grant and Catherine O'Hara, her co-star ten years before in The Last Of The High Kings, yet even with this charming cast and an important message for young girls with body issues the film would not be properly released for another two years. Really, Ricci's luck in this area was appalling.

There'd be more problems with her next movie, Black Snake Moan. This was a superior piece where former bluesman Samuel L Jackson would have his wife leave him for his best friend and be left to tend his garden in the Deep South outback. One morning, though, he finds Ricci lying in the road, drugged up and badly beaten. A victim of terrible abuse as a child, she leads a self-destructive life of drugged-up sex with strangers. Jackson takes her in, chains her to a radiator to stop her escaping and tries to lead her back to the path of righteousness and help her in her possibly redemptive relationship with traumatised soldier Justin Timberlake, at the same time rediscovering his own love of life and music. It was an interesting work, emotionally testing yet satisfying, with Ricci superb in her rage and fear. The idea, she said, was to explore the results of abuse, the way victims, endlessly anticipating the next bout of pain and degradation, find relief only in the aftermath, when they know they're safe for a while. Thus they seek to be abused again, in order to find that relief. The producers, though, clearly felt otherwise, marketing the movie with a picture of Ricci scantily clad and chained and a tag-line that read "Everything's hotter down South". It was another blow to Ricci, who'd fought hard to get the role and considered Black Snake Moan to contain her best work yet. Several years before she'd turned down a part in The Rules Of Attraction as she'd found its rape sequence to be offensive. Now she'd make her stance still plainer when she increased her work with RAINN, the Rape Abuse Incest National Network. She'd backed them since 1998, but now became a National Spokesperson, in April, 2007, voicing their concerns to Congress.

Ricci would reunite with Jackson for her final release of 2006, Home Of The Brave. Not unlike The Best Years Of Our Lives, this would concern troubled vets returning from Iraq to face an uncertain future. Jackson would turn to alcoholism and reject his family, Jessica Biel would have to deal with the loss of a hand while Brian Presley would suffer guilt at his failure to save his friend. Ricci would appear briefly as that friend's mourning lover, raging against the war and macho notions of heroism, and cracking up when given a box of her man's belongings.

Though she'd talked publicly of marriage and starting a family, and had lived for some time with her boyfriend in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed place she'd bought from Diane Keaton in Los Feliz (not Beverly Hills or Malibu, of course), in 2007 Ricci and Adam Goldberg would split, thus heralding a time of new experiences. Ricci had always said that she'd love to be a movie star but refused to make the necessary sacrifices, appealing to the paparazzi and making movies she hated. Jodie Foster and Holly Hunter were her role models. Now she had a chance, her first, to appear in a bona fide blockbuster. This was Speed Racer, based on the early Japanese anime series Mach Go Go Go (dubbed and named Speed Racer for the US market in 1967) and directed by the Wachowski brothers. Here Emile Hirsch would be the titular racer, trying to carry on his family's racing traditions while rejecting overtures from giant corporations and trying to solve the mystery of his brother's disappearance in a crash years before. John Goodman would play his ex-champ dad, with his mother being Susan Sarandon, who'd earlier appeared in Ricci's episode of Malcolm In The Middle. Ricci herself would play Hirsch's girlfriend Trixie, who keeps an eye on him from a pink helicopter and, though girlie, kicks serious butt. Ricci's friends had long told her that, with her huge eyes, wide forehead and small mouth she'd make a perfect anime heroine. Speed Racer proved them correct. It would also bring Ricci a new boyfriend in Australian actor Christopher Gurry, known as Kick (it's almost impossible to accept that Ricci would date someone called Kick. Thankfully Gurry did not receive the nickname due to jock exploits). She'd then move on to New York, I Love You, a many segmented affair mirroring 2006's Paris, Je T'Aime. Then she'd lend her voice to the animation Alpha And Omega, also featuring her Gap ad co-star Dennis Hopper.

With Blaspheme Films, Christina Ricci has several movies in production, including Speed Queen, based on the novel by Stewart O'Nan. She has said, though, that after the problems faced by Prozac Nation and Pumpkin, she would henceforth be concentrating entirely on her acting. This would be a shame for as a producer she could be a force for good. Ricci's industry problems have all sprung from her desire to make fine and challenging pictures, a desire one hopes continues to burn strong. Though she once described herself as a "psychotic goth witch", the world of cinema would be a far darker place without her.

Dominic Wills