Winona Ryder – Family, Family Tree

Winona Ryder was born on October 29, 1971. She is an American actress and is one of the most iconic actresses of the 1990s. Her nickname is Noni. She made her film debut in the 1986 film Lucas. Her stage name has been derived from Mitch Ryder who was a rock singer.

Family of Winona Ryder:

Winona Ryder’s mother is Cynthia Palmer who is a video-producer, an author and an editor. She is a Buddhist. Her father, Michael Horowitz was born on December 11, 1938. He is also an author, editor, antique-bookseller and a publisher. He works with West Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the owner of Flashback Books. She belongs to a Jewish family and they emigrated from Ukraine.
Ryder has one full sibling, a younger brother, Uri Horowitz and two half-siblings from her mother, Jubal Palmer, and an older half-sister, Sunyata Palmer.

Her godfather is Timothy Francis Leary. He was born on October 22, 1920. He was a famous American psychologist and a writer. He was best known for his exploration of therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs. He along with his wife created the world’s largest library of drug literature. He died in the year 1996.

Early life and Education:

Ryder was home schooled at times because of the frequency of movement of her family from one place to another. They even went to live in places with no electricity that raised her interest towards reading. It was because of her mother that she started developing an interest in acting. She used to make her watch a few movies every now and then.

In 1983 when she was 12 years old, she joined American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco where she took her acting lessons. She graduated from Petaluma High School in 1989. She frequently plays a character who writes. In majority of her films, she played the role of a journalist or a reporter.