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Winona Laura Horowitz was born to Michael and Cindy Horowitz on October 29, 1971, in Winona, Minnesota.
Michael and Cindy had met in San Francisco, Michael was from New York and Cindy from St. Paul,Minnesota.Winona was their first child, Cindy having had two children, Sunyata and Jubal, from a previous marriage.
The name Winona is a Sioux Indian word meaning "first born daughter", her parents came upon the name while writing a book on shamanism just before she was born.
Both of her parents were and still are intellectual activists, who spent
the late 1960's involved in the intellectual side of the hippie cultural
movement that had evolved during that time. Winona has been greatly influenced
by their activism, as is evident in her support for Amnesty international,
and contributing to the funding the Polly Klaas Foundation for missing
and exploited children.
"My parents did what they were passionate
about, and they didn't make money," Winona says.
"What inspired me the most is ... that while
they are both very educated and very smart and could have been anything
they wanted to be, they chose something where they made no money. But they
were so happy doing it, and we grew up with an abundance of love and conversation".
Winona Horowitz enjoyed what you'd call an unorthodox
childhood-Growing up in a house where a high value was placed on reading,
Winona's bible became J.D. Salinger's coming-of-age novel,"The Catcher
in the Rye".She estimates that she has read it 50 times!
When she was seven years old, Winona's family repaired to an upscale commune located on a three-hundred-acre plot of land in the northern California town of Elk, where they coexisted with seven other families and a bunch of horses. The kids obviously didn't have televisions (after all, they had no electricity in their homes), but Winona's mother operated a movie theatre in an old barn, where she screened the classic films that provided her enthralled daughter with the key to her future.
After a year of living in the sticks, the family moved back to
the relative civilization of Petaluma, California. During her first week
at her new school, Winona, a fresh-off-the-commune tomboy, was jumped by
a gang of pubescent thugs who proceeded to trounce her good for being such
an obvious wuss.
"They thought I was a gay boy," she has
offered by way of explanation. The unfortunate thrashing yielded fortunate
results:
Ryder earned a stint of home study, but more importantly, her parents let her enroll in acting classes at the prestigious American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where bullies were few and far between.
Talent scouts spotted her on the A.C.T. stage
and had her test for the role of Jon Voight's daughter in Desert Bloom.
She didn't get the part, but Director David Seltzer, spotted her and cast
her in "Lucas" (1986). When the credits rolled, Winona Horowitz officially
became Winona Ryder; her new surname was inspired by a Mitch Ryder
album belonging to her father.
"Lucas" (1986) gave Winona a good start and paved the way for more films, in which she played a series of alienated teenager roles, some comedies, and later, more mature roles in serious dramas.
Her performance in the unmemorable film led in
turn to a role as a teen in Square Dance (1987) ; Ryder's career tide got a decided turn for the
better with Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988), in which she played a death-courting,
black-garbed teen named Lydia. She again plumbed the darker teenage impulses
in the black-as-coal comedy Heathers (1989) ,to date, the favorite film
of her prodigious career,which had her conspiring with a preternaturally
sardonic Christian Slater to murder members of high school cliques and
then make the deaths appear to be suicides. That same year, she turned
in a fine performance as the thirteen-year-old bride and first cousin of
Jerry Lee Lewis, in Great Balls of Fire! For Tim Burton's EdwardScissorhands,
she donned an ill-conceived blonde wig to play a more conventional teen
swept up in an unconventional Beauty and the Beast attraction with a bizarre
creature played winningly by her then fiance, Johnny Depp.
Ryder was selected for the part of Mary Corleone
in Godfather: Part III, The (1990), but had to drop out of the role after
catching the flu from the strain of doing the films Welcome Home, Roxy
Carmichael (1990) and Mermaids (1990) back to back. She said she didn't
want to let everyone down by doing a substandard performance. Others have
suggested that she pulled out from the part because of problems with boyfriend
Johnny Depp, with whom she had been going out since she was 17. Depp got
a tattoo saying "Winona Forever" put on his biceps.
Winona Ryder was set to film Bram Stoker's Dracula
(1992) as a TV movie with Michael Apted, but took the script to Francis
Coppola and he agreed to film it. She later made Age of Innocence, The
(1993) which was directed by Martin Scorsese who she believes to be "the
best director in the world"..If critics were divided of Ryder's performance
in "Dracula", they were in absolute agreement over her Oscar nominated
supporting turn as May Welland in that movie, a film adapted from Edith
Wharton's merciless portrait of 19th-century New York aristocracy.
In 1994, Ryder stepped out of her crinolines to achieve iconic status as the quintessential Gen-Xer in Reality Bites, held her own in a cream of the crop cast in the butchered adaptation of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, and then capped off the year with an Oscar nominated performance as Jo March in Little Women. Ryder dedicated the latter film to Polly Klaas, a young girl from Ryder's hometown who was kidnapped and brutally murdered in 1993. (At the time of the crime, Ryder put up a $200,000 reward for information leading to the child's attacker, and she continues to be a strong supporter of the Polly Klaas Foundation.)
Ryder in 1996 alone, she rounded out the star
studded cast of Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, playing Lady Anne in a
documentary about playing William Shakespeare's Richard III.She reunited
with her Age of Innocence co-star and ex-flame Daniel Day-Lewis in an adaptation
of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. ("She's as good as it gets," Miller commented
of Ryder's Abigail.) Ryder next test is Alien Resurrection, in which she
plays an android to Sigourney Weaver's reanimated Ripley.
