Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder, born Winona Laura Horowitz on October 29, 1971, in Winona County, Minnesota, is an American actress. Raised by her parents Cynthia Palmer and Michael D. Horowitz, she grew up alongside several siblings and spent part of her childhood living on a commune in California before moving to Petaluma. At age 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco to begin acting lessons. She chose her stage name from singer Mitch Ryder, of whom her father was a fan.

Ryder made her feature film debut in the 1986 high school drama Lucas, followed by a role in Square Dance (1987). She rose to wider prominence portraying a goth teenager in Tim Burton's comedy Beetlejuice (1988). Following this breakthrough, she starred in the satirical dark comedy Heathers (1989), Great Balls of Fire! (1989), and the fantasy film Edward Scissorhands (1990). Her early 1990s roles also included performances in Mermaids (1990), Night on Earth (1991), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

During the mid-to-late 1990s, Ryder established herself as a major dramatic actress. She received consecutive Academy Award nominations for her roles as May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) and as Jo March in Little Women (1994). For The Age of Innocence, she won a Golden Globe Award. Her film career continued with prominent roles in Reality Bites (1994), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), The Crucible (1996), and Alien Resurrection (1997), as well as Celebrity (1998), Girl, Interrupted (1999), and Mr. Deeds (2002). Outside of live-action feature films, she earned a Grammy Award nomination for narrating Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl in 1995.

Following a break from acting in the early 2000s after her 2001 shoplifting arrest and subsequent media attention, Ryder returned to cinema with roles in Star Trek (2009), Black Swan (2010), When Love Is Not Enough (2010), and The Dilemma (2011).

Ryder experienced a major career resurgence when she was cast as Joyce Byers in the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–2025), a role that earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Television Series Drama. Her later projects include starring in the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America (2020) and reprising her earlier collaboration with Tim Burton in the feature sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).