Winona Laura Horowitz (born October 29, 1971), professionally known as Winona Ryder, is an American actress. Originally playing quirky roles, she rose to prominence for her more diverse performances in various genres in the 1990s. She has received many accolades, including a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as nominations for a Grammy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Academy Awards.
After Ryder's film debut in Lucas (1986), she gained attention with her performance in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988). She further rose to prominence with major roles in Heathers (1989), Great Balls of Fire (1989), Mermaids (1990), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). She garnered critical acclaim and two consecutive Academy Award nominations for her portrayals of socialite May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) and Jo March in Little Women (1994). Her other films during this period were Reality Bites (1994), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), The Crucible (1996), Alien Resurrection (1997), Celebrity (1998), and Girl, Interrupted (1999), which she also executive-produced.
In 2002, Ryder starred in another critically panned box office hit Mr. Deeds, after which her career declined and she took a break from films. In 2009, she returned in the high-profile film Star Trek. In 2010, she was nominated for two Screen Actors Guild Awards: as the lead actress in the television film When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story and as part of the cast of Black Swan. She also reunited with Burton for Frankenweenie (2012). Since 2016, she has starred as Joyce Byers in the Netflix science fiction horror series Stranger Things, for which she has received Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations; while in 2020, she starred in the HBO drama miniseries The Plot Against America.
Ryder's relationship with Johnny Depp from 1989 to 1993 and a 2001 arrest for shoplifting were both targets of tabloid journalism. In 2000, Ryder received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Early life
Winona Laura Horowitz was born on October 29, 1971, in Winona County, Minnesota, to Cynthia Palmer (née Istas) and Michael D. Horowitz. Her mother is an author, video producer, and editor, and her father is an author, editor, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller. He also worked as an archivist for psychologist Timothy Leary (who was Ryder's godfather). Her father is from a Russian Jewish and Romanian Jewish family. Growing up, she visited her paternal grandparents in Brooklyn for Passover every year.
Named after Winona, Minnesota, Ryder was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents' friendship with Laura Huxley, writer Aldous Huxley's wife. Her stage name derives from Mitch Ryder, a soul and rock singer of whom her father was a fan. Ryder's father is an atheist and her mother is a Buddhist. Ryder has a younger brother, Urie (named in honor of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin), and two older half-siblings from her mother's prior marriage: half-brother Jubal Palmer and half-sister Sunyata Palmer. Ryder's family friends were her godfather Timothy Leary, the Beat Movement poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. In 1978, when Ryder was seven years old, she and her family relocated to Rainbow, a commune near Elk, Mendocino County, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (120 ha) plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or television sets, Ryder began to devote her time to reading and became an avid fan of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.
When she was ten, Ryder and her family moved to Petaluma, California. During her first week at Kenilworth Junior High, she was bullied by children who mistook her for an effeminate boy. In 1983, 12-year-old Ryder enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she took her first acting lessons. During the same year she nearly drowned, which caused her to develop aquaphobia. This psychological trauma caused problems later in her life during the underwater scenes in Alien Resurrection (1997), some of which had to be reshot numerous times. Ryder's bullying experiences continued through high school, when she achieved early film success with Beetlejuice: "I remember thinking, 'Ooh, it's like the number-one movie. This is going to make things great at school.' But it made things worse. They called me a witch." In 1989, Ryder graduated from Petaluma High School with a 4.0 GPA.
Ryder has stated that her natural hair color is brown, but she was "really blonde as a kid", and when she was 11 or 12 she started dying her blonde hair blue and purple. At the time of her audition for the 1986 film Lucas, her hair had been dyed black and the filmmakers asked her to keep it.
