Winona Ryder's godfather was Timothy Leary, and her surname came from a rock singer
Born Winona Horowitz on a rural Minnesota farm, she was named after the nearest town, given a middle name honouring Aldous Huxley's wife, and grew up with Timothy Leary as her godfather. The stage name Ryder came from a musician her father admired. By 22 she had two Oscar nominations.
Ryder was born on October 29, 1971, in Winona County, Minnesota, to two writers and editors; her father, an antiquarian bookseller, also worked as an archivist for the psychologist Timothy Leary. Family friends included the poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The family moved to Petaluma, California, when she was 10, and in her first week at the new junior high, classmates picked on her, taking her for an effeminate boy. At 12 she began lessons at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
Her break began with a videotaped audition in which she recited a monologue from J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. She lost that part, but the director David Seltzer cast her in Lucas in 1986, and when asked how she wanted to be credited, she suggested Ryder, after the singer Mitch Ryder. Tim Burton saw her there and made her the goth daughter in Beetlejuice, a hit. Her agent begged her to turn down the dark satire Heathers, warning it would wreck her career; critics praised her instead. The black hair filmmakers had asked her to keep after Lucas nearly cost her that breakthrough.
The early 1990s brought Edward Scissorhands, again with Burton and opposite her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp, which took $86 million at the box office, and a run of literary adaptations. Playing May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, a director she calls the best in the world, won her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, followed immediately by another for playing Jo March. Not everything landed: The House of the Spirits grossed just $6 million on a $40 million budget.
A 2001 shoplifting arrest and the harsh press that followed pushed her off screen for much of the early 2000s. Parts in films such as Black Swan marked her comeback, and then found a new generation of fans as Joyce Byers in Netflix's Stranger Things, which ran from 2016 to 2025.
Source: Winona Ryder
