Winona Ryder, an emblem of '90s cool, grows up

Los Angeles

IN an early episode of the new Netflix supernatural drama Stranger Things, a single mother played by Winona Ryder sits in a cubbyhole communicating with her youngest son through a tangled ball of blinking Christmas lights. He has vanished under mysterious circumstances. To better understand how to sell such a strange, emotional moment, Ryder looked no further than her own mother, Cynthia Palmer.

"I don't have kids, so my mom helped me a lot on this," Ryder, 44, said while sitting on a big leather couch at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, dressed in black jeans and …