When reality bites Hollywood gossip tells it this way. During the shoot of the comedy Mr Deeds Goes to Town, to be released later this year, actress Winona Ryder was known to shamelessly boast that she could swipe anything that wasn't nailed down. No, she was not talking about stealing young male hearts - which she does with alarming accuracy - or celluloid scenes. She was proclaiming herself as the queen of shoplifters. Now, after being charged with four felonies - theft, burglary, vandalism and possession of a controlled substance - stemming from her shoplifting arrest at the upmarket Saks store in Los Angeles, the otherwise usual grapevine yarn seems to ring heavy with irony. Of course, the doe-eyed 30-year-old Hollywood hottie has pleaded not guilty and her high-profile lawyer Mark Geragos has dismissed the whole incident as 'a mistake'. But then, as a Los Angeles district attorney office spokesman put it, 'What do you think he is going to say? Most suspects aren't Winona Ryder.' True. Neither can most celeb suspects match her bill. Born Winona Laura Horowitz, she has been twice nominated for an Oscar - for 1993's The Age of Innocence and 1994's Little Women. She is the Gen-X sex symbol - many of her films such as Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, Reality Bites are hailed as onscreen versions of the '90s grunge sensibility. And more importantly, she has consistently turned up her nose at being the Hollywood bimbo in favour of offbeat, even dark and brooding, films and characters. To drive home the point, she paints her otherwise blonde hair, mostly associated with dumb beauty, dark brown. 'She's Ava Gardner but add 80 IQ points,' says a friend. Often labelled quirky and precocious by film journalists (to which her reaction is 'they should be shot'), playing the misfit has cost her her career. She hasn't had a hit in years - the last being Girl, Interrupted in 1999 but then Angelina Jolie stole the show. Although she still commands a $6 million fee per film and is widely respected by the industry, her continuous straddling between conformity and unconventionality - in real and screen life - has lead to the several physical and emotional breakdowns she has had in the past decade. According to Dr Robert Millman, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell University, if high-profile people don't receive the acclaim that they have grown used to, 'they plummet, like bursting a narcissistic balloon... it's tremendously isolating. Then they actually take physical or personal risks because they are not adequately paying attention to the outside world.' In 1990, Ryder showed the first signs of fragility. That year, she backed out of the plum role of Mary Corleone (Michael Corleone's daughter) in The Godfather: Part III after reportedly catching the flu. The decision drew a lot of flak but since she was riding high at that point, critics let her off the hook pretty easy. Three years later, she admitted herself in a hospital, burnt out from the filming of House of The Spirits, wracked by the breakup with her first serious boyfriend, actor Johnny Depp, and suffering from insomnia and anxiety attacks. Almost a mirror image of the character she played in Girl, Interrupted and much like many of the troubled teens she has portrayed in her films. Last August, she again pulled out of the film Lily and the Secret Planting. Her part was handed over to Kate Winslet. This time she proved a feast for the tattler mags. Her love life has been a rocky revolving door of actors and musicians, many of them known more for their brains than brawns, who brought their share of drama and discord. Depp was just the first to go. From rockers Dave Pirner and Beck to Hollywood whizkid Matt Damon, her whirlwind relationships have made her a Liz Taylor on hyperdrive. A joke, popularised by Kurt Cobain's widow Courtney Love, sums it up like this: 'In rock, you are nothing if you haven't slept with Winona Ryder.' And Love, who's one of Ryder's best friends these days, is no good influence either. The Nirvana woman was booked in Beverly Hills in 1993 for a drug overdose. Two months back, both of them got into a scuffle during a U2 concert in LA and security officers had to intervene. Blame it on bad company or what you will, Ryder also spent a lot of time in 2001 trying to quell allegations that her ups and downs stemmed from a drug problem that worsened with every tumultuous affair. Her representatives denied the accusations but one of them admitted that 'because of her upbringing, she's certainly experimented.' Ryder has spent her whole life on the edge of the establishment. Her parents were bonafide hippies, who hung around with the likes of beat poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD guru-cum-60s philosopher Timothy Leary, her godfather. She was brought up in a rural commune in northern California, where sex and drugs were as mainstream as cola and authority didn't have much respect. When she was about 12, she was charged with stealing a comic book. When the police turned up at the Horowitz household with Winona in their custody, her parents gave them a good whacking. Even today, Ryder has a little wink in her eyes when she talks about her parents. 'I remember one time my father came to pick me up from school. He was wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and they wouldn't let him pick me up,' she once related in a Rolling Stone interview. However, it wasn't her dad but Ryder herself who was responsible for being kicked out of school, proving that she no conformist either. Her alleged crime? Vagrancy and witchcraft, the very crimes that her character was charged with in the screen adaptation of the Arthur Miller classic, The Crucible. When you add to all this the fact that the counterculture classic Catcher in The Rye is her favourite book and she supposedly possesses a copy of every edition ever released, you have the picture of a rebel -- moody yet winsome and talented with avant-garde leanings. Even the change from Horowitz to Ryder was typically Winona - an act of whim. Shortly before the release of her first movie Lucas in 1986, Winona was asked how she wanted her name to appear on the credits and she asked for Ryder. 'I think my dad had a Mitch Ryder album on,' she later revealed. What was even more quintessential Winona was her explanation to a security officer in Saks. When caught, she allegedly told them that she was merely conducting research for a movie character at the suggestion of her director. Word is out that no such film is in the pipeline. But doesn't that explanation sound like it is coming straight from the mouth of Catcher hero Holden Caulfield?