Winona Ryder was brought up being told fame “doesn’t matter”.
Winona Ryder was brought up being told fame ‘doesn’t matter’
The 52-year-old ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ actress made her film debut aged 15 in 1986’s ‘Lucas’ and was raised in a commune called Rainbow in California by two parents she still worships.
She told Esquire about how the younger generation are obsessed with ‘likes’ on socials: “If you try to find out what they are into, it’s this idea of followers and how many you have. That’s all that matters, that you’re rich and famous.”
Winona added when she was a teen “any time” she was going through “a tough time” she was told “all that matters is that you’re OK”.
She also said the most memorable advice handed down to her about being famous was: “All this stuff (fame, money, popularity) doesn’t matter.”
Winona is named after the county of Winona, Minnesota – her mother’s home state, where she was born but not raised, and she grew up in North Beach, San Francisco, until her family moved to the Rainbow commune in northern California when she was seven.
The US Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was Winona’s childhood baby-sitter, while Dr Timothy Leary – the psychologist and LSD pioneer – was her godfather.
She said: “I grew up in a very liberal environment.”
The actress added her writer parents Cynthia Palmer and Michael D Horowitz are now in their 80s and still together, and said they are still her idols.
She said: “Genuinely, (my mother and father) are my favourite people. They were so admirable in the sense of what they chose to do, as opposed to what they could have done.
“They were very educated, they could have taken jobs and settled down, but they followed their hearts. They did what they loved. Writing together. Running the museum. Activism.
“I really revere them.”
Winona’s dad was involved in the US civil rights movement while her mother volunteered as a hospice workers.
The actress said she also inherited their love of being “archivists” as she is a hoarder who collects pop-culture items such as records, movie posters and band tour T-shirts.
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