Biography:
The daughter of free-lovin', counterculture types who named her after the Minnesota town in which she was born. Winona Horowitz enjoyed what you'd call an unorthodox childhood--the Horowitz clan's idea of family bonding was a good-and-rowdy protest against Agent Orange.

When Winona was 8 years old her family moved to Petaluma, California. After getting beat up by a gang of young thugs during her first week at school, Winona’s 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 a in Desert Bloom. She didn't get the part, but her tape was impressive enough to gain her representation by Triad Artists, who set her up with a role as a poetry-loving teen 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.

Her shining performance in the unmemorable film led to a role in the little-heeded Square Dance (1987); her next role as an anti-war activist in the critically reviled 1969 was certainly nothing to write Petaluma about either. 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 comedy Heathers (1989)--to date, the favorite film of her prodigious career. That same year, she turned in a fine performance (in a not-so-fine movie) as the thirteen-year old bride and first cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis, in Great Balls of Fire! Her next few films flopped as well, but one thing was becoming certain: Ms. Ryder had the warped teen thang pretty well nailed. For Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, she donned an ill-conceived blonde wig to play a more conventional teen--a cheerleader no less--swept up in an unconventional Beauty-and-the-Beast attraction with a bizarre creature played winningly by her then-fiancé, Johnny Depp. While the film certainly was the most auspicious outing of her career up to that point, the fact remained that Ryder was fed up with playing a teenager, forever poised tremulously on the cusp of maturity. Independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch helped bridge the generation gap somewhat by writing a special part for Ryder in his anthology Night on Earth--she plays an L.A. cabbie who dreams of becoming a mechanic.

In 1992 Winona received a screen play based on Bram Stocker’s novel, Dracula. She approached acquaintance Francis Ford Coppola with it and he agreed to direct. Coppola's decadent and erotic Bram Stoker's Dracula provided Ryder with the break she had been looking for: finally, for the first time in her career, she was playing a mature woman, and what's more, the woman in question was the object of the immortal count's blood-soaked desire. Ryder also managed a fairly convincing British accent (we wish the same could be said for co-star Keanu Reeves) but not everyone was convinced that she pulled the role off. If critics were divided on the ultimate effectiveness of Ryder's performance in the film, they were in absolute agreement over her Oscar-nominated supporting turn as May Welland in The Age of Innocence, 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. Also in 1994 she gave the Oscar-nominated performance (this time in the Best Actress category) as Jo March in Little Women.

With the delicate, ethereal beauty of a consumptive heroine of yore, and an impressive range, Ryder has already proven herself to be one of the most luminous and successful interpreters of the 19th century. But considering her card-carrying Generation-X status, her well-publicized love history (which includes steamy chapters titled "Johnny Depp," "Christian Slater," "Daniel Day-Lewis," "David Pirner," "David Duchovny," "David Pirner, Part II," and "Matt Damon"), and her equal virtuosity at playing latter-day leads, Ryder is undoubtedly very present in the present. In 1996, she rounded out the star-studded cast of Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, playing Lady Anne in Al Pacino's documentary about performing William Shakespeare's Richard III; and she reunited with her Age of Innocence co-star and ex-flame Daniel Day-Lewis in an adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

Ryder next tested the limits of time, space, and believability, with Alien Resurrection, in which she aids Sigourney Weaver's reanimated Ripley in battling aliens, and 1998 brought a role as an irresponsible actress in Woody Allen's Celebrity and another high-profile romance, in the person of Matt Damon. James Mangold's 1999 adaptation of the Susanna Kaysen novel Girl, Interrupted earned Ryder both a headlining role and an executive producer credit. In 2000 Winona appeared in the weepy romance Autumn in New York opposite Richard Gere and the thriller Lost Souls. In 2002 she played Adam Sandler’s love interest in the successful Mr. Deeds, and was in the comedy Simone.