Winona Ryder

Winona Laura Horowitz was born in Winona County, Minnesota, to Cynthia Palmer (née Istas) and Michael D. Horowitz. Winona's 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 (Ryder's godfather). Winona's father's family is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and hails from Ukraine and Romania. Growing up, Winona visited her paternal grandparents in Brooklyn for the Jewish Holiday of Passover, every year. Named after Winona, Minnesota, Winona Ryder was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents' friendship with Laura Huxley, writer Aldous Huxley's wife. Winona's stage name derives from Mitch Ryder, a soul and rock singer of whom her father was a fan. Her father is an atheist and her mother is a Buddhist. Winona 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. Winona'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 she 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, Winona 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, Winona 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; the experience caused her to develop aquaphobia. The 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 continued to be bullied 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 said that her natural hair color is brown, but she was "really blonde as a kid"; when she was 11 or 12, she started dyeing 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.