Yahoo Movies 'Mermaids' Flashback! Watch Hilarious, Young Christina Ricci, Winona Ryder, and Cher
It’s been 25 years since Mermaids swam into theaters. The fish-out-of-water romantic dramedy starred Cher as a 1960s-era single mother of two daughters, played by Winona Ryder and a very young Christina Ricci in her first film role. The plot centered around this unconventional female family as they move to a small Massachusetts town. In honor of the 1990 film, we’ve unearthed some choice moments from the three actresses’s media rounds promoting Mermaids:
Ricci was just 9 when she appeared on the Regis and Kathie Lee Show in 1990 to plug Mermaids. Among the many adorable moments in the youngster’s interview is her story about how she was cast after filmmakers saw her in a school play. “I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of it,” she giddily admits.
Winona Ryder wasn’t so lucky. A teenager herself at the time, she appeared painfully awkward on the British talk show Wogan. It didn’t help that host Terry Wogan lobbed her a bunch of cheesy questions!
As an added bonus, we give you a red-wigged Cher on the very same Wogan show as she admits she doesn’t know why the film — and the book on which it was based — is called Mermaids to begin with! (Watch at the 10:50 mark). “It was so similar to my youth experience,” she adds, explaining that growing up with a single mother is why she took the role. (Cher’s mother, Jackie Jean Crouch, married and divorced the star’s gambling and hard-drinking father, John Sarkisian, three times and remarried a handful of times after that.) “I play my mother and Winona plays me,” Cher adds in the 1991 interview.
Be sure to catch her, Ricci, and Ryder at the 8:50 mark dancing ‘60s-style in her video for “The Shoop Shoop Song,” featured in the film. It’s so cute!
(Photo: Orion Pictures)
