Winona Ryder (born Winona Laura Horowitz) is an American actress born on October 29, 1971 in Winona, Minnesota to Michael and Cindy Horowitz. Cindy Horowitz (nee 'Palmer') was a WASB (White Anglo-Saxon Buddhist) while Michael Horowitz was of Russian and Romanian Jewish descent. His family's original name had been 'Tomchin' but they had been wrongly assigned the name 'Horowitz' by U.S. immigration officials at Ellis Island. Winona Ryder was named after the town in Minnesota where she was born. Notable family friends included her godfather Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
When she was seven years old she and her family resided at a commune in Elk, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 300-acre (1.2 km˛) plot of land. As the area had no electricity Ryder took to reading, particularly appreciating the novel Catcher in the Rye. Her mother did however show her some films on a screen in the barn, which perhaps lead her to develop an interest in what would later make up her career. At age 10 the family moved again to Petaluma, California. She was harassed her first week of junior high school there when a group of bullies mistook her for a feminine, scrawny boy. This led her to be schooled at home that year, but she also spent time attending the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she started taking acting lessons.
