Winona is Winning
We couldn’t be more excited for Destination Wedding starring Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder. Not only because it looks like a pretty good romcom but because we love Winona Ryder. Ever since her epic comeback in the Netflix series Stranger Things our world has been all about Winona. Many of you might not realise that not only is Winona a prolific film actress but she’s been in some pretty massive cult hits over the last thirty years! Want to know more? Then read on!
Winona Ryder was born on October 29, 1971. Her mother is an author, video producer and editor while her father is an author, editor, publisher and antiquarian bookseller. Her father’s family are Jewish (they emigrated from Romania and Russia), and Ryder has described herself as Jewish. Many of her father’s family perished in the Holocaust. Her name was inspired by the city of Winona.
When Winona was seven years old her family relocated to Rainbow, a commune near Elk, Mendocino County, California, where they lived with seven other families on a 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!
As an actress, Winona was a huge deal in the 80s and 90s. She made her film debut in the 1986 film Lucas but it wasn’t until her role as Lydia Deetz, a goth teenager in Tim Burton’s
Beetlejuice, that she won critical acclaim and mainstream recognition. Then after various appearances in film and on television, Winona landed the lead role in the cult film Heathers.
The film was a controversial satire of teenage suicide and high school life that has since become a huge cult hit despite the fact that Winona’s agent told her not to take the role because he believed it would ruin her career!
Winona later appeared in the coming of age drama Mermaids, earning a Golden Globe nomination, then in Burton’s dark fairy-tale Edward Scissorhands, and in Francis Ford Coppola’s gothic romance Dracula and then won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award nomination in the same category for her role in The Age of Innocence in 1993 as well as another Academy Award nomination, as Best Actress, for the literary adaptation Little Women the following year!
Winona and Gwyneth Paltrow used to be best friends but the two have been feuding ever since Gwyneth allegedly stole the Oscarwinning role Shakespeare In Love from Winona. Somehow, we believe that Gwyneth would do something like that. Did you guys also know that Johnny Depp and Winona were together for four years before she broke things off! She also dated Matt Damon in 1997 for three years but they broke up after rumours that he was cheating on her with Penélope Cruz surfaced.