Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder has built a career around characters who rarely feel entirely at home in their surroundings. Born Winona Laura Horowitz in Winona County, Minnesota, on October 29, 1971, she took her stage surname from singer Mitch Ryder and began acting lessons at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre when she was 12. Her first film role came in Lucas in 1986, but Beetlejuice and Heathers established the screen presence that would define her early career: watchful, dryly funny and naturally suited to outsiders. As Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice, she found a productive early connection with director Tim Burton. In Heathers, she helped turn a vicious high-school satire into a cult film, balancing its darkness with an alert, grounded performance. Ryder moved easily between contemporary stories, fantasy and literary adaptations throughout the 1990s. She reunited with Burton for Edward Scissorhands, appeared opposite Cher in Mermaids and played Mina Murray and Princess Elisabeta in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Her performance as May Welland in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence earned her a Golden Globe as well as Academy Award and BAFTA nominations. The following year, her spirited Jo March in Little Women brought a second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actress. Later roles continued to test that mix of vulnerability and steel. She starred in The Crucible, played an android in Alien Resurrection, and served as an executive producer and lead actor on Girl, Interrupted. After a period away from regular screen work, she returned through independent films and supporting parts including A Scanner Darkly, Star Trek and Black Swan. Television gave Ryder another substantial role with Joyce Byers in Stranger Things. Her urgent, intensely protective performance became central to the science-fiction horror series, whose cast won a Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble work. She has since returned to Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, extending one of the roles that first made her such a distinctive figure in American film.