Actors - Winona Ryder

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	Actors - Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder (born Winona Laura Horowitz on October 29, 1971) is an American actress.

Biography

Ryder was born in Olmsted County, Minnesota to Cindy Istas and Michael Horowitz, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania. She was named for the nearby city of Winona. Her father's family was originally named 'Tomchin', however Ryder has stated that they were wrongly assigned the name of the family that they were travelling with when they arrived at Ellis Island, in 1906. 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.

When she was seven years old she and her family resided at Rainbow, a commune near Elk, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (1.2 km²) plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or televisions, Ryder took to reading. Her mother did, however, show her some films on a screen in the barn, which perhaps led her to develop an interest in what 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 an effeminate, 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 of mad society and her own heart - she wins that battle by choosing neither and by 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.

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Actors - Winona Ryder

Biography

Film career

1985–1990

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