Winona Ryder (born Winona Laura Horowitz) is an American actress born on October 29, 1971 in Winona, Minnesota to Michael and Cindy Horowitz. Cindy Horowitz (nee 'Palmer') was of English descent while Michael Horowitz was born in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania. His family's original name had been 'Tomchin' but they had been wrongly assigned the name 'Horowitz' by U.S. immigration officials at Ellis Island.
Ryder's parents named her 'Winona' after the town in Minnesota where she was born. She has a younger brother Yuri (named after Yuri Gagarin), an older half-brother Jubal and an older half-sister Sunyata. Notable family friends included her godfather Timothy Leary and beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Childhood
When she was seven years old she and her family resided at a commune in Elk, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (1.2 km²) plot of land. As the area had no electricity Ryder took to reading, particularly appreciating the novel Catcher in the Rye. Her mother did however show her some films on a screen in the barn, which perhaps lead her to develop an interest in

would later make up her career. At age 10 the family moved again to Petaluma, California. She was harassed her first week of junior high school there when a group of bullies mistook her for a feminine, scrawny boy. This led her to be schooled at home that year, but she also spent time attending the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she started taking acting lessons.
Film career
1985–1990
In 1985, Ryder sent a video audition to appear in the film Desert Bloom, but was rejected. However, David Seltzer, a writer and director, soon noticed her and cast her for his 1986 film Lucas for a role of a teenage outcast, falling in love, but ignored, by the main character. When asked how she wanted her name to appear in the credits, she suggested Ryder as a Mitch Ryder album of her father's played in the background.
Her next movie was Square Dance (1987) (called "a remarkable debut" by The Los Angeles Times), where her teenage character creates a bridge between two alien worlds/plot devices - a traditional farm in the middle of nowhere and a Big City. Her role concentrates on a profound question: how much of our behaviour perceived by the outside world is inherent to us and how much comes from acting the social role under pressure of the society, in a way that society considers "proper" and ethical implications coming from this classical conflict of interest, which she later had a chance to make perfect in The Age of Innocence.
Her breakthrough film is generally considered to be Tim Burton's 1988 film Beetlejuice, in which she played a goth teenager named Lydia suffering from depression induced by the extreme consumer worldview her parents represent, who comes to live in a haunted house (the haunting performed by Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton). She is the only human being among the players able to feel strong empathy and sympathy toward the ghosts and their drama of being captured in between the world of the living and the afterworld. The movie was a commercial and media success.
In 1989, she starred in a now cult movie - Heathers, which her agent thought was bad for her career. Her character is opposed to violence as a way to resolve conflicts and is able to express her views by stopping major violent accidents from happening. Again her character struggles, forced to choose between the will

orld is inherent to us and how much comes from acting the social role under pressure of the society, in a way that society considers "proper" and ethical implications coming from this classical conflict of interest, which she later had a chance to make perfect in The Age of Innocence.
Her breakthrough film is generally considered to be Tim Burton's 1988 film Beetlejuice, in which she played a goth teenager named Lydia suffering from depression induced by the extreme consumer worldview her parents represent, who comes to live in a haunted house (the haunting performed by Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton). She is the only human being among the players able to feel strong empathy and sympathy toward the ghosts and their drama of being captured in between the world of the living and the afterworld. The movie was a commercial and media success.
In 1989, she starred in a now cult movie - Heathers, which her agent thought was bad for her career. Her character is opposed to violence as a way to resolve conflicts and is able to express her views by stopping major violent accidents from happening. Again her character struggles, forced to choose between the will of mad society and her own heart - she wins that battle in a pat by choosing neither and playing all parties against themselves, so she can be left alone to decide about her life. In the same year she did Great Balls of Fire, playing the thirteen-year-old bride of Jerry Lee Lewis.
In 1990, Winona played a primary role in another Burton project, Edward Scissorhands, alongside her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp. It is her only movie, other than 2002's Mr. Deeds, in which one can admire her natural blond hair which she has dyed dark since childhood.
She withdrew from her role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part III, after feeling exhausted from recent roles — she finished two somewhat related movies Mermaids (with Cher, Christina Ricci, Bob Hoskins and Michael Schoeffling) and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (with Jeff Daniels), both shot in 1990 and both stressing the motive of the ability of our own personal narrative changing our real life.
1991–1995
In 1991, she played a taxi driver who wants to become a mechanic (Night on Earth), against the forced repertoire of roles selected for women by gender prejudices.
In 1992, she starred in the double role of Mina Harker and Princess Elisabeta, in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The next year she appeared in The Age of Innocence (alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis), a film based on a novel by Edith Wharton and helmed by director Martin Scorsese, whom Ryder considers the best director. She plays a young woman, captured in plots within plots within plots of the society where every sentence pronounced has at least three different meanings. The constant merciless war of countless conspiring factions is mirrored in the scenery, full of symbols and ciphered messages passed by secret agents of love trying to tell truth while avoiding the insane rage of organised madness around them. Her role in this movie won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination.
Next she starred in How to Make an American Quilt (1995) - again the character is forced to choose between a will of the "quilting bee" and her desires, followed by Boys, (1996), again fighting for her self against the whole world, with love as her only true friend and guide. The movie also featured the motive of confusion between subjective and objective interpretations of perceived