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Short Biography

Winona Laura Horowitz (born October 29, 1971), better known under her professional name Winona Ryder, is an American actress. She started her career in 1986. Although Ryder made her screen debut in Lucas (1986), her first significant role came in 1988 with Beetlejuice as Lydia Deetz, a Gothic teenager, in a performance that gained her critical and commercial recognition. After making various appearances in film and television, Ryder continued her career with the cult film Heathers (1989) in a prominent and critically acclaimed performance. Her subsequent roles have won her not only critical praise but numerous film awards. In 2000, Ryder received a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California.

Ryder is known for her relationship with actor Johnny Depp throughout the early 1990s. She also received noteworthy media attention for her participation in the investigation of the kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas in 1993, who was from Ryder`s hometown of Petaluma, California. Ryder also received worldwide attention after her arrest on December 12, 2001 for shoplifting from a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Beverly Hills, California.

Early life and education

Born Winona Laura Horowitz in Olmsted County, Minnesota, she was named after the nearby city of Winona. She was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents` friendship with Aldous Huxley`s wife, Laura Huxley. Her mother, Cynthia Palmer (n?e Istas), is an author, as well as a video producer and editor. Her father, Michael Horowitz, is an author, editor, publisher and antiquarian bookseller. Ryder`s mother is a Buddhist and her father is an atheist. Regarding her ancestry, Ryder has described herself as "Jewish", her paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and relatives of hers died in the Holocaust. Ryder has one sibling, a younger brother, Uri, an older half-brother, Jubal, and an older half-sister, Sunyata. Ryder`s family friends included her godfather, LSD guru Timothy Leary, beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and science fiction novelist Philip K Dick.

In 1978, when Ryder was seven years old, she and her family relocated to Rainbow, a commune near Elk, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (1.2 km?) plot of land. As the remote property had no electricity or television sets, Ryder began to devote her time to reading and became an avid fan of J. D. Salinger`s Catcher in the Rye. She developed an interest in acting after her mother showed her a few movies on a screen in the family barn. At age 10, Ryder and her family moved on again, this time to Petaluma, California. During her first week at the Kenilworth Middle School, she was bullied by a group of her peers who mistook her for an effeminate, scrawny boy. As a result, she ended up being homeschooled that year. In 1983, when Ryder was 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she took her first acting lessons. Ryder graduated from Petaluma High School with a 4.0 GPA in 1989. She has also revealed that she suffers from aquaphobia due to the trauma caused by an incident in which she nearly drowned at age 12. This caused problems when she had to act in some of the underwater scenes in Alien: Resurrection (1997) and the scenes had to be reshot numerous times.

Career

Early works, 1985?1990

In 1985, Ryder sent a videotaped audition, where she recited a monologue from the novel