Early Life and Education
Named after the nearby city of Winona, Winona Laura Horowitz was born in Olmsted County, Minnesota. She was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents' friendship with Laura Huxley, writer Aldous Huxley's wife. Her stage name derives from Mitch Ryder, a soul and rock singer her father happened to be listening to when her agent called and asked how she wanted to appear on the credits of her first film.
Her mother, Cynthia Palmer (née Istas) is an author, video producer, and editor. Her father, Michael Horowitz, is an author, editor, publisher, and antiquarian bookseller. He also worked as an archivist for psychedelic guru Dr. Timothy Leary (who was Ryder's godfather). Ryder's father is Jewish, and she has described herself as Jewish. Her paternal grandparents were immigrants from Russia and Romania; many of her father's family perished in the Holocaust. Her father's family was originally named "Tomchin", but took the surname "Horowitz" when they immigrated to America.
Ryder's father was an atheist and her mother a Buddhist; they encouraged their children to take the best part of other religions to make their own belief systems. Ryder has stated "I still practice Buddhism to a certain extent and I believe in karma."
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. Ryder's family friends included her godfather, LSD guru Timothy Leary, as well as the Beat Movement poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.
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. 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. She developed an interest in acting after her mother showed her a few movies on a screen in the family barn. At age 10, Ryder and her family moved on again, this time to Petaluma, California. During her first week at the 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 homeschooled that year. In 1983, when Ryder was 12, she enrolled at the American Conservatory Theater in nearby San Francisco, where she took her first acting lessons. Ryder graduated from Petaluma High School with a 4.0 GPA in 1989. She suffers from aquaphobia because of a traumatic near-drowning at age 12. This caused problems with the underwater scenes in Alien Resurrection (1997), some of which had to be reshot numerous times.
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