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WHEN Winona Horowitz was a little girl, she used to sleep in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom.
Her greatest fear was someone would knock on the door and drag them off to be murdered... like her father’s family who perished in the Holocaust.
“I think it came from overhearing stories of what happened in the camps,” says the actress now known to the world as Winona Ryder.
“I was terrified of being separated from them. In World War II, my mum’s father died fighting the Nazis in the Pacific and, on my father’s side, family members died in the camps.
“I am grateful my parents told me the truth, though they had to pick the right age to tell me because it is so horrific.
“But I used to go to the library and look at books about it. I couldn’t stop turning the pages and thought, ‘This is horrible, why am I doing this?’
“Then I realised maybe I was looking for my family, for someone I recognised.”
Winona, 48, has been a war buff ever since. That may surprise fans who recall the Goth icon and poster girl of the 1980s and 1990s who starred in Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Girl, Interrupted.
ROLLERCOASTER
But she remains one of Hollywood’s most intriguing and unconventional leading ladies, with a rollercoaster personal life.
Yet her Jewish heritage has also seen her experience anti-semitism at first hand. “There are times when people have said, ‘Wait, you’re Jewish? But you’re so pretty!’” she revealed recently.
“There was a movie I was up for a long time ago – a period piece – and the studio head, who was Jewish, said I looked ‘too Jewish’ to be in a blueblooded family.”
And only last month Winona became embroiled in a row with Mel Gibson after repeating an allegation that, years ago, he asked her if she was an “oven dodger” – a term referring to the gas chambers.
Actor Gibson accused her of lying, saying in a new statement: “This is 100 per cent untrue.”
The exchange came as Winona hits TV screens once more in The Plot Against America, which starts on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday.
Based on Philip Roth’s novel and with a screenplay by the creators of The Wire, it tells of a working-class Jewish family living in an alternate 1940s New Jersey.
Aviator Charles Lindbergh ascends to the Presidency on a wave of xenophobic and anti-semitic rhetoric, opposing US intervention in the war.
Winona plays Evelyn Finkel, who falls for a charismatic Nazi-sympathising rabbi. She believes the story is uncannily relevant amid the rise of political hate-speak.
“It’s a very personal story,” she says.
“If you are a grandchild or a child of European Jews, it’s hard not to be untouched by it.
“It’s also a taste of what we’re living in now and what we might possibly be heading into in the future, if we don’t get out and vote. I’m excited because a lot of my fans are young and this is timely and relevant.” Named after her home town of Winona, Minnesota, she grew up in a commune outside San Francisco where her bohemian author parents became friends with beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Her godfather is “LSD guru” Timothy Leary, the psychologist who wanted to turn America on to psychedelic drugs. Her first movie role, aged 13, was in highschool flick Lucas. She was bullied at her own school for