Winona Ryder

Her passport says Winona Laura Horowitz. Half the world knows her by a surname that came off a Mitch Ryder record playing at her father's house, on the afternoon her agent rang to ask how she wanted to be credited on her first film. At fourteen, she said the first thing she heard.

She was born on 29 October 1971 on a farm in Winona County, Minnesota, which is where the first name comes from. Her parents, Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz, were writers and editors of the Californian counterculture, and the psychologist Timothy Leary was her godfather. In 1978 the family moved to Rainbow, a commune in northern California with no electricity and no television, where she turned into an obsessive reader of Salinger.

At ten they moved to Petaluma, and she had a rough time of it there. School bullying followed her, and it didn't let up once she started appearing in films. At twelve she enrolled at the acting school of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. A debut followed in 1986 with the teen drama 'Lucas', and a year later critics began paying attention thanks to 'Square Dance'.

Tim Burton and a gallery of odd girls

She made Beetlejuice (1988) with Tim Burton at sixteen, as Lydia Deetz, the goth teenager who sees the ghosts the adults can't. It's the film that changed her life, and she has said as much many times over: she owes her career to Burton. Around her stood Michael Keaton, Catherine O'Hara, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis.

A year later came Heathers (1989), Michael Lehmann's black comedy in which she and Christian Slater work their way through the popular girls at school. Its studio put it out without much faith, audiences found it on video, and it has since become one of the great cult titles of the eighties, with a stage musical to go with it.

Burton had her back for Edward Scissorhands (1990), where she played Kim, the suburban girl Johnny Depp's character falls for. They were a couple for four years, which kept the tabloids fed. That same year she was Cher's eldest daughter in Mermaids, with a nine-year-old Christina Ricci as the younger sister.

Before that she'd played Jerry Lee Lewis's teenage bride in 'Great Balls of Fire!' (1989) opposite Dennis Quaid, and in 1991 she drove the cab in the Los Angeles segment of Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth, with Gena Rowlands in the back seat.

Mary Corleone was meant to be hers too, in The Godfather: Part III (1990), but she arrived in Rome worn out after three films back to back and pulled out. Francis Ford Coppola gave the part to his daughter Sofia, a decision that shaped how the film was received for good.

Two Oscar nominations in two years

Coppola and Ryder made their peace at a meeting where she left a screenplay on his desk, the 'Dracula' James V. Hart had written. Out of that came Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), with her as Mina Murray against Gary Oldman's count, plus Anthony Hopkins and Keanu Reeves.

Then came the best two years of her career. May Welland in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993), with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer, won her the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and a first Oscar nomination. In the same year she played Blanca in Bille August's The House of the Spirits, from the Isabel Allende novel, alongside Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.

The second nomination, this time in the lead category, came from Jo March in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (1994), with Susan Sarandon, Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst and Christian Bale. Ryder dedicated the performance to Polly Klaas, the Petaluma girl abducted and murdered in 1993, for whose safe return she had put up 200,000 dollars of her own money. Klaas had been a reader of the Louisa May Alcott novel.

She split the rest of the decade between indies and the big studios. Lelaina in Reality Bites (1994), Ben Stiller's directing debut, with Ethan Hawke; Finn in 'How to Make an American Quilt' (1995); and Abigail Williams in The Crucible (1996), the Arthur Miller adaptation Nicholas Hytner directed with Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield and Joan Allen.

Next came the android Call in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection (1997), with Sigourney Weaver, and Nola in Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998), opposite Kenneth Branagh.

The nineties closed with the project that was most her own. Having bought the rights to Susanna Kaysen's memoir, she spent years fighting to get it made: Girl, Interrupted (1999), directed by James Mangold, which she both led and produced. Its one Oscar went to her co-star, Angelina Jolie.

The arrest in Beverly Hills

A new century started badly. Autumn in New York (2000), the Richard Gere melodrama directed by Joan Chen, was savaged by critics, and 'Lost Souls' came and went. Comedy served her better: she turned up as herself in Zoolander (2001), did an episode of Friends as an old sorority housemate of Rachel's, and played the reporter in Mr. Deeds (2002), opposite Adam Sandler.

On 12 December 2001 she was arrested at Saks in Beverly Hills with roughly 5,500 dollars' worth of clothes and accessories. A televised trial followed the next year, and she was convicted of grand theft while acquitted of burglary. Three years' probation followed, plus 480 hours of community service, fines and restitution, and in 2004 the felonies were reduced to misdemeanours.

Years later she explained that she'd been going through a depression at the time and taking painkillers prescribed by a doctor who subsequently lost his licence. What came next was a near four-year blackout with nothing on release.

Star Trek, Black Swan and two David Simon series

Coming back took time, and almost always in supporting parts. First was Donna in A Scanner Darkly (2006), the film Richard Linklater animated over live footage with Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, then Cheryl in The Informers (2008).

Two roles in 2009 put her back in circulation: Amanda Grayson, Spock's human mother, in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek, and Sandra in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. A year on she played Beth Macintyre, the dancer Natalie Portman's character replaces, in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010). Short, vicious, and a useful reminder of what she could do.

Supporting work filled the decade that followed: Ron Howard's The Dilemma (2011); The Iceman (2012), as the wife of the contract killer played by Michael Shannon; the voice of Elsa Van Helsing in Burton's Frankenweenie (2012); Homefront (2013) with Jason Statham; Stanley Milgram's wife in Experimenter: the Stanley Milgram Story (2015), with Peter Sarsgaard; and Destination Wedding (2018), ninety minutes of bickering with Keanu Reeves.

Television paired her twice with David Simon. First on Show Me a Hero (2015), as the president of the Yonkers city council alongside Oscar Isaac. Then on The Plot Against America (2020), the Philip Roth adaptation in which she was Evelyn Finkel, the unmarried sister-in-law who takes up with the Lindbergh-supporting rabbi played by John Turturro, with Morgan Spector and Zoe Kazan heading the household.

Joyce Byers and what comes next

The part that has put her back at the centre of things, though, is Joyce Byers, the Hawkins mother who talks to her missing son through a string of Christmas lights. Stranger Things landed on Netflix in July 2016, the cast won the 2017 SAG Award for Best Ensemble in a Drama Series, and she picked up a third Golden Globe nomination.

The series signed off on 31 December 2025, and the last episode saved the decisive blow against Vecna for Joyce, an axe swing Matt and Ross Duffer called the most emotional decapitation they could write. Nine years of shooting went by with Millie Bobby Brown, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Charlie Heaton and Sadie Sink growing up in front of the camera.

Somewhere in the middle of all that she was Lydia Deetz again. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), with Burton and Keaton once more and Jenna Ortega as her daughter, took close to 380 million dollars worldwide, thirty-six years after the original. An uncredited turn as a tour guide in Haunted Mansion (2023) came in between.

Her next job reunites her with Burton and Ortega for a third time. Netflix signed her in February 2026 for the third season of Wednesday, where she plays a character called Tabitha across several episodes. Filming wrapped outside Dublin on 30 September, and no release date has been set.

Away from the set she has been with the fashion designer Scott Mackinlay Hahn since 2011 and has said more than once that she has no intention of marrying. Balenciaga named her a brand ambassador in early 2026. Speaking to 'Esquire' in 2024, she said the sexual harassment she met early on soured her appetite for making films, and that she won't be naming anyone. Today she turns fifty-five, forty years after that first credit.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Winona Ryder is Beetlejuice (1988); in all, 36 films and 5 TV shows over 37 years. They have worked as actress in 41 and producer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Stranger Things (2016), with 1,895 votes. Their busiest decade is the 1990s, with 14 titles. The person they have worked with most is Tim Burton, on 4 films, among them Frankenweenie and Edward Scissorhands.