Christina Ricci was one of the most captivating actresses of the ’90s. A child prodigy and with a character that did not go unnoticed, she had everything to be one of the great stars of the cinema considering that she worked under the direction of great directors such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam or Woody Allen.
However, the career of the talented and magnetic actress waned at the beginning of this century. When her career emerged, suddenly no one took her into account.
As a child star, she was best known for her role as the malevolent Merlina Addams in “The Crazy Addams“. Ricci was the little goth girl who rose to fame at age nine and liked to surprise. She literally grew up in front of the camera and landed her first starring role in “My Mother, the Mermaid“, with Cher and Winona Ryder. On the screen, she continued to cultivate an image of a young woman too tired of everything for her age. When the actress was already coming out of adolescence, she began to have problems finding work, becoming to this day those stars that appear and disappear.
Although she never stopped working, things had changed for her. During that difficult time until her 20s, Ricci still offered acclaimed performances in films such as “The Ice Storm”, “Buffalo ’66”, “The Opposite of Sex” or “Prozac Nation”. She also dabbled in television, making occasional guest appearances on shows like “Ally McBeal” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” the latter work earning her an Emmy nomination in 2006.
At one point in her life, Ricci decided that she wanted to be happy, knowing that she would always be judged. She grew up in the public eye and knows the business perfectly. For her, those reviews just provide the perfect excuse for another dramatic turn.
“Every time someone tries to tell me what I am, I change immediately and I am something else,” said the actress, now 42, in one of her last interviews with Indiewire.
“I can’t help it. I’m a complete idiot in that sense. I never give that to people. I have a desire and a real drive to define myself and not be defined by others.”
Her career has been erratic and her life behind the cameras has had lights and shadows.
Hollywood’s “weird” girl
From a very young age, Christina Ricci decided that she would be successful, no matter what. Her acting career began with a peculiar story in elementary school. In a 2008 interview with New York Magazine, the actress said that when she was 8 years old, she wanted to star in the end-of-the-year play, but that role was between her and another child. Without thinking twice, Ricci devised a cunning plan to be victorious: she began to tease that child so constantly that one day that child, fed up, hit her.
The result: her partner was expelled from the play and she got the part.
“I was always an ambitious person”, said. Despite her young age and that she was starting in a school act, she had the coldness necessary to succeed in Hollywood, a place where lack of scruples sometimes works in her favor.
When she was only 9 years old, she made her film debut, hand in hand with Cher and Winona Ryder. However, fame would come a year later when she played Merlina Addams in the 1991 version of “The Addams Family“.
Her performance wowed film critics. Soon one of her first leading roles also came to her, in 1995, with “Casper”. By the time she was 15, she had made eight movies, including two monster hits. And in 1999 she was chosen by Tim Burton for the feature film “Sleepy Hollow”, where she shared the screen with Johnny Depp.
She was born in Santa Monica, California, the last of four siblings. Daughter of a former model and a specialist in primal therapy (a type of deep psychotherapy). Since her father tended in the basement, the family spent years listening to the screams of the patients. Her parents separated when she was 13 years old, and she had no further contact with him. In the past, she has described Ralph as a “difficult and paranoid man” who “taught them that there is no selflessness, that no one ever likes you.”
“I think he thought that because he was like that, so were everyone else. He was passing on his little secret to his children,” he told The Guardian.
She didn’t believe him.
“It didn’t affect me because I decided it wasn’t true. No way. Life can’t be like this.”
The actress could never get away from that image of a “dark girl” in Hollywood, a label she sometimes earned thanks to provocative and controversial statements, such as when she assured that incest seemed “great and natural” and that she was not afraid of to die.
“People kept asking 17-year-old girl questions! I had nothing of value to say. I hadn’t experienced anything yet, stop asking me for opinions! I didn’t know what to say, so I was answering something unpleasant,” she later explained to The Guardian.
She cemented a personality on herself on screen: a stormy and manipulative teenager with dangerous sexuality. She also created an off-screen personality: the actress who would say anything. Years later, she would recognize it as a mistake.
“Interviews bothered me and my way of bothering was being sarcastic and shocking.”
“I was afraid of myself”
That role of a rebellious and unpredictable teenager, was perfected in titles such as “The Opposite of Sex” and “Buffalo ’66.” Also in the press. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1999 about the comedy where she often appeared in a bikini, she said: “The director became obsessed with my b***bs. Now she is angry because I have lost weight and they are smaller”.
That interview also demonstrated the media’s obsession with Christina’s body.
During high school in New Jersey, she struggled with an eating disorder for a year and a half, until therapy helped her control it.
“It’s really uncomfortable going through puberty, growing up and becoming a woman, when everyone is always looking at you,” Ricci explained.
In her senior year she moved to New York with her mother, a period during which she gained weight. She wasn’t getting papers and her anxiety was taking over.
“I felt like a failure,” she told Rolling Stone magazine.
Ricci began to feel the pressures of trying to conform to Hollywood standards. She felt that she had to maintain that diminutive physique to continue working. In her privacy she rejected her own image. She began to battle with anorexia, cutting her arms and covering all the mirrors in her house.
“For years, I hated myself. I literally couldn’t have a mirror in my room.”
Her low self-esteem led her to not be able to sit in a restaurant or somewhere where she could see her reflection.
Tired of the gossip about her health, in 2010, the actress said that she had suffered from eating disorders until she was 16 years old and her recovery began when she realized that she could end up in a hospital “fed through a tube” and decided to fight to get ahead.
“I was lucky because I only suffered it for a year and a half more or less, because they put me in therapy very soon and I was able to overcome it,” she declared on the program The Talk, broadcast on CBS in January 2012.
“My brain had become my greatest torment. I was afraid of myself,” Christina confessed, who learned a great lesson from the help of therapy: “It took me a while to feel comfortable with who I was. Realize that not everyone may like me. I’m not going to change who I am. I have tried it. It does not work.”
Ricci also recalled the nasty comments of Vincent Gallo, with whom she starred in the low-budget film “Buffalo 66” in 1998. The actor-director confessed that he hired a 17-year-old Ricci because it was his “erotic myth.” Two years after the film’s release, Gallo called her an “ungrateful bitch” during an interview and said she was “basically a puppet. I told her what to do, and she did it.”
Ricci told HuffPost that the entire experience of filming the movie was challenging, especially because of the actor’s demeanor. “It was the first time that I worked without my mother around, because he asked me not to bring her. I was 17 years old and had never worked with someone like that. I spent most of that movie trapped in a car with a delusional lunatic.”
The rebirth after hell
In 2011 she starred in the failed series “Pan Am”, a drama that showed the life that the crew of the emblematic American airline led. Although the series only lasted one season, it gave Ricci the opportunity to meet her husband, James Heerdegen.
The technician and the actress married in 2013 and, a year later, they had their first child, Frederick Heerdegen.
Everything indicated that the couple enjoyed a happy marriage. Nothing is further from reality. Ricci was living a horror movie that she never wanted to star in. In 2020 the artist herself unveiled the hell she was living in the middle of the pandemic, when the world was confined to their home.
Ricci requested a divorce and obtained a restraining order against Heerdegen, after having denounced him for physical and mental abuse.
In the court documents, the actress reported that since 2019 she had suffered episodes of violence from her partner, something that intensified during social isolation, noting that he attacked her on two occasions.
It all started in December 2019, when Heerdegen first abused her. In the first episode of violence, Heerdegen hit, spat and made pig noises in the face” of the actress, reported the TMZ site, which gained access to the court filing. That incident, during which she suffered multiple bruises, convinced Ricci that she needed to get as far away from him as possible. After informing him that she wanted to separate, the quarantine began and “found herself trapped in a house with a violent abuser.”
In June 2020, while they were still confined, Ricci said he chased her around the house, grabbed her wrists and dragged her into the garden. Another day, he threw coffee and a chair at her in the presence of her 6-year-old son. In her complaint, the actress even attached shocking images showing her injuries.
Ricci said that he had feared for his life. During a car trip in late 2019, she recounted that James “said something that made me think that [he] could kill me. He said the only way he could feel sorry for me is if I were dismembered into small pieces.”
For his part, Heerdegen also requested a restraining order against her, but the request was denied and he also lost custody of his son, whom he can see under supervision.
Although it has only been a few months since the actress could get out of the hell that she lived with her ex-husband, she decided to start over.
Ricci began a relationship with hairdresser Mark Hampton. The couple, who currently reside in Canada, announced a few days ago that they will soon expand the family.
“Life keeps getting better.” With this brief but positive message and accompanied by a photograph of an ultrasound, the actress announced that she was expecting her second child.
At work, Ricci is part of “The Matrix 4”, the great science fiction saga starring Keanu Reeves, which hits theaters around the world on December 22.
She will also soon be seen in the television thriller “Yellowjackets,” a Showtime production that will address the story of a team of female soccer players who survived a plane crash; premieres on November 14.
