Winona Ryder Trivia: 75 interesting facts about the actress!

Winona Ryder is an American actress. She is one of the most profitable and iconic 1990s actresses. Let’s see some amazing fact and trivia about her!

1.Her real name is Winona Laura Horowitz.

2.She was born on October 29, 1971.

3. Winona Ryder was born in a farmhouse near Winona, Minnesota.

4. Her mother is an author, video producer, and editor. Her father is an author, editor, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller.

5. Many members of her father’s family perished in the Holocaust.

6. Her father’s family was originally named “Tomchin” but took the surname “Horowitz” when they immigrated to the United States.

7. She was named after the nearby city of Winona

8. She was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents’ friendship with Laura Huxley, writer Aldous Huxley’s wife.

9. Her stage name derives from Mitch Ryder, a soul and rock singer of whom her father was a fan.

10. Winona Ryder’s father is an atheist and her mother is a Buddhist, they encouraged their children to take the best part of other religions and use them to make their own belief systems.

11. Winona Ryder has one full sibling, a younger brother, Uri (named in honor of the first Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin), and two half-siblings from her mother’s prior marriage: an older half-brother, Jubal Palmer, and an older half-sister, Sunyata Palmer.

12. Winona Ryder’s family friends are her godfather, Timothy Leary, the Beat Movement poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.

13. In 1978, when Ryder was seven years old, she and her family relocated to Rainbow, a commune near Elk, Mendocino County, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (120 ha) plot of land.

14. 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 The Catcher in the Rye.

15. She developed an interest in acting after her mother showed her a few movies on a screen in the family barn.

16. At age 10, Ryder and her family moved on again, this time to Petaluma, California.

17. During her first week at Kenilworth Junior High, she was bullied by a group of her peers who mistook her for an effeminate, scrawny boy. As a result, she ended up being home-schooled that year.

18. In 1983, when Ryder was 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she took her first acting lessons.

19. In 1989, Ryder graduated from Petaluma High School with a 4.0 GPA.

20. She suffers from aquaphobia because of a traumatic near-drowning at age 12.

21. This caused problems with the underwater scenes in Alien: Resurrection (1997), some of which had to be re-shot numerous times.

22. In 1985, Ryder sent a videotaped audition, where she recited a monologue from the novel Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, to appear in the film Desert Bloom.

23. Although the part went to Annabeth Gish,  writer/director David Seltzer noticed her talent and cast her in his 1986 film Lucas, about a boy called Lucas (Corey Haim) and his life at high school.

24. Shot in the summer of 1985, the film co-starred Charlie Sheen and Kerri Green with Ryder playing Rina, one of Lucas’s friends at school.

25. When asked how she wanted her name to appear in the credits, she suggested “Ryder” as her surname.

26. Her next film was Square Dance (1987), where her teenage character creates a bridge between two different worlds – a traditional farm in the middle of nowhere and a large city.

27. Ryder won acclaim for her role, and The Los Angeles Times called her performance in Square Dance “a remarkable debut.”

28. Both films, however, were only marginally successful commercially.

29. Director Tim Burton decided to cast Ryder in his film Beetlejuice (1988), after being impressed with her performance in Lucas.

30. In the film, she plays goth teenager Lydia Deetz. Lydia’s family moves to a haunted house populated by ghosts played by Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton. Lydia quickly finds herself the only human with a strong empathy toward the ghosts and their situation. The film was a success at the box office, and Ryder’s performance and the overall film received mostly positive reviews from critics.

31. Winona Ryder landed the role of Veronica Sawyer in the 1988 independent film Heathers. Winona Ryder’s agent initially begged her to turn the role down, saying the film would “ruin her career.

32. The film was a box office flop, yet achieved status as a predominant cult film.

33. Later that year, she starred in Great Balls of Fire!, playing the 13-year-old bride (and cousin) of Jerry Lee Lewis. The film was a box office failure and received divided reviews from critics.

34. In April 1989, she played the title role in the music video for Mojo Nixon’s “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child.”

35. In 1990, Ryder was selected for four film roles. She played the leading female role alongside her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp in the fantasy film Edward Scissorhands. Edward Scissorhands was a significant box office success, grossing US$56 million at the United States box office and receiving much critical devotion.

36. Later that year, she withdrew from the role of Mary Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III (after traveling to Rome for filming) due to exhaustion.

37. Eventually, Coppola’s daughter Sofia Coppola was cast in the role.

38. Ryder’s ninth role was in the family comedy-drama Mermaids (1990), which co-starred Cher and Christina Ricci. Mermaids was a moderate box office success and was embraced critically

39. For her performance, Ryder received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

40. Winona Ryder then performed alongside Cher and Christina Ricci in the video for “The Shoop Shoop Song”, the theme from Mermaids.

41. Following Mermaids, she had the lead role in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, a film about an adopted child Dinky Bossetti played by Ryder. The film co-starred Jeff Daniels and was deemed a flop due to its poor showing at the box office.

42. In 1991, Ryder played a young taxicab driver who dreams of becoming a mechanic in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The film was given only a limited release at the box office, but received critical praise.

43. Winona Ryder then starred in the dual roles of Count Dracula’s reincarnated love interest Mina Murray and Dracula’s past lover Princess Elisabeta, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a project she brought to director Francis Ford Coppola’s attention.

44. In 1993, she starred in the melodrama The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende’s novel. Winona Ryder played the love interest of Antonio Banderas’ character.

45. Winona Ryder starred in The Age of Innocence with Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis, a film based on a novel by Edith Wharton and helmed by director Martin Scorsese, whom Ryder considers “the best director in the world.”

46. Her role in this movie won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination in the same category.

47. Winona Ryder was set to star in Broken Dreams with actor River Phoenix. The project was put on hold due to his untimely death in 1993.

48. Winona Ryder’s next role was in the Generation X drama Reality Bites (1994), directed by Ben Stiller, in which she played a young woman searching for direction in her life. Her performance received acclaim and the studio hoped the film would gross a substantial amount of money, yet it did not make as much money as expected.

49. In 1994, Ryder was handpicked to play the lead role of Josephine March in Little Women, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel.

50. She received a Best Actress Oscar nomination the following year.

51. She made a guest appearance in The Simpsons episode “Lisa’s Rival” as Allison Taylor, whose intelligence and over-achieving personality makes her a rival of Lisa’s.

52. Her next starring role was in How to Make an American Quilt (1995), an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Whitney Otto, co-starring Anne Bancroft.

53. Winona Ryder made several film appearances in 1996, the first in Boys. The film failed to become a box office success and attracted mostly negative critical reaction.

54. Her next role was in Looking for Richard, Al Pacino’s documentary on a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, which grossed only $1 million at the box office, but drew moderate critical acclaim.

55. In December 1996, Ryder accepted a role as an android in Alien: Resurrection (1997), alongside Sigourney Weaver, who had appeared in the entire Alien trilogy.

56. Ryder’s brother, Uri, was a major fan of the film series, and when asked, she took the role

57. Winona Ryder then starred in Woody Allen’s Celebrity (1998), after Drew Barrymore turned down Ryder’s role, in an ensemble cast.

58. In 1999, she performed in and served as an executive producer for Girl, Interrupted, based on the 1993 autobiography of Susanna Kaysen.

59. Winona Ryder was deeply attached to the film, considering it her “child of the heart.”

60. The following year, she starred in the melodrama Autumn in New York, alongside Richard Gere.

61. On October 6, 2000, Ryder received her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located directly in front of the Johnny Grant building next to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. She was the 2,165th recipient of this honor

62. Ryder had a hiatus after her shoplifting incident in 2001.

63. In July 2003, she was number 183 on VH1’s and People magazine’s “200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons” countdown list.

64. In 2006, following her hiatus, Ryder appeared in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, a film based on Philip K. Dick’s well-received science fiction novel of the same name. Ryder starred alongside Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr. and Woody Harrelson.

65. Winona Ryder was cast by director J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek, as Spock’s human mother Amanda Grayson.

66. She starred alongside Robin Wright and Julianne Moore in Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, released on February 9, 2009 at the 59th Berlin International Film Festival, with a limited US release scheduled for November 2009.

67. She was reunited with Tim Burton for a role in the animated 3D feature film Frankenweenie, released in October 2012, and appeared alongside James Franco in the action thriller Homefront (2013).

67.  At 2015 she was also announced as the face of Marc Jacobs.

68. In 2016, Ryder starred in the Netflix original series Stranger Things created by the Duffer Brothers.

69. Winona Ryder was engaged to actor Johnny Depp for three years beginning in July 1990.

70.  She met Johnny Depp at the Great Balls of Fire! premiere in June 1989; two months later they began dating.

71. Following her split from Depp, she dated Soul Asylum front man Dave Pirner for three years, from 1993 to 1996.

72. She later had a two-year relationship with actor Matt Damon between 1998 and 2000.

73. In 1993, Ryder offered a reward in the hope that it would lead to the return of kidnapped child Polly Klaas.

74.  After the girl’s death, Ryder starred as Jo in the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and dedicated her performance to Klaas’ memory. Little Women was one of Klaas’ favorite novels.

75. She has been dating since 2011 Scott Mackinlay Hahn.