Winona Laura Horowitz, better known under her professional name Winona Ryder, is an American actress. She made her film debut in the 1986 film Lucas. Ryder’s first significant role came in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice as a goth teenager, which won her critical and commercial recognition. After making various appearances in film and television, Ryder continued her career with the cult film Heathers, a controversial satire of teenage suicide and high school life, which drew Ryder further critical and commercial attention.

After playing diverse roles in numerous well-received films, Ryder 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 for Little Women the following year for Best Actress. In 2000, Ryder received a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, California.

Ryder’s personal life has been widely reported by the media. Her relationship with actor Johnny Depp in the early 1990s was highly publicized and received much scrutiny by the media and tabloid press. A much talked about 2001 shoplifting incident led to a four-year hiatus from acting. She has also revealed her personal struggle with anxiety and depression, briefly checking into a clinic. In 2006, Ryder returned to the screen, and some media outlets called her performance “a remarkable comeback” to acting.

Born Winona Laura Horowitz in Olmsted County, Minnesota, she was named after the nearby city of Winona. She was given her middle name, Laura, because of her parents’ friendship with Aldous Huxley’s wife, Laura Huxley. Her mother, Cynthia Palmer, is an author, as well as a video producer and editor. Her father, Michael Horowitz, is an author, editor, publisher and antiquarian bookseller. Ryder has described herself as Jewish. Her grandparents were immigrants from Russia and Romania; her father’s family was originally named “Tomchin”, but was wrongly assigned the surname “Horowitz” by U.S. immigration officials at Ellis Island. Ryder’s mother is a Buddhist and her father is an atheist. Ryder has one full sibling, a younger brother, Uri, an older half-brother, Jubal, and an older half-sister, Sunyata. Ryder’s family friends included her godfather, LSD guru Timothy Leary, beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick.

William Nicholas Selig was a pioneer of the American motion picture industry.

Selig was raised in Chicago. He worked as a vaudeville performer and produced a traveling minstrel show in San Francisco while still in his late teens. One of the actors was Bert Williams, who went on to become a leading African-American entertainer. In 1894 Selig saw Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope at an exhibition in Dallas, Texas. He returned to Chicago, opened a small photography studio and began investigating how he might make his own moving pictures without paying a patent fee to Edison’s company. Selig reportedly found a metalworker who had unwittingly repaired a Lumière brothers motion picture camera and with his help, developed a working system. In 1896 Selig founded the Selig Polyscope Company in Chicago, one of the first motion picture studios in America. He began making actuality shorts, travelogues and industrial films for Chicago businesses.

In 1909 Selig was the first producer to expand film-making operations to the West Coast, where he set up studio facilities in the Edendale area of Los Angeles with director Francis Boggs. Southern California’s weather allowed outdoor filming for most of the year and offered varied geography and settings which could stand in for far flung filming locations around the world. Los Angeles also seemed to offer geographical isolation from Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, a cartel which Selig later reluctantly joined.

In 1911 Boggs was murdered by a Japanese gardener employed by the company. Selig was shot and wounded in the arm while trying to defend him.

William Louis Petersen is an American actor and producer, best known for playing Dr. Gilbert "Gil" Grissom on the hit CBS series .

He has also portrayed President John F. Kennedy in the 1998 TV film The Rat Pack. Petersen is notoriously selective about the film roles he chooses, and has turned down roles in several films that went on to become modern classics.

Petersen, the youngest of six children, was born in Evanston, Illinois, to parents who worked in the furniture business. His father was Danish-American Arthur Edward Petersen, Sr. and his mother was German-American June Hoene Petersen. He has two brothers, Arthur, Jr. and Robert, plus three sisters: Anne, Mary Kay, and Elizabeth. He graduated from Bishop Kelly High School in Boise, Idaho, in 1972. He was accepted to Idaho State University on a football scholarship. While at Idaho State, Petersen took an acting course which changed the direction of his life. He left school along with his wife, Joanne, in 1974 and followed a drama professor to the Basque country where he studied as a Shakespearean actor. Petersen was interested in Basque culture and he studied the Basque language, Euskera, and gave his daughter the Basque name Maite Nerea ; she was born in Mondragón 1975. Petersen returned to Idaho intent on being an actor. Not wanting to work a non-acting job in Idaho, he returned to the Chicago area, living with relatives. He became active in the theater and earned his Actors' Equity card. He performed with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, of which he has been an ensemble member since 2008, and was a co-founder of the Remains Theater Ensemble which also included other prominent Chicago actors Gary Cole and Ted Levine.

He is usually credited without his middle initial .

William Holden was an American actor. Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1954, and the Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1974. One of the top stars of the 1950s, he was named one of the “Top 10 stars of the year” six times and appeared on the American Film Institute’s AFI’s 100 Years?100 Stars list as #25.

Holden, eldest of three sons, was born as William Franklin Beedle, Jr. in O’Fallon, Illinois, the son of Congregationalist parents Mary Blanche, a schoolteacher, and William Franklin Beedle, Sr., an industrial chemist. The family, which moved to South Pasadena, California when he was three, was of English descent; Holden’s paternal great-grandmother, Rebecca Westfield, was born in England in 1817, while some of his mother’s ancestors emigrated in the 17th century to Millenback, Lancaster County, Virginia in the U.S. from England.

After graduating from South Pasadena High School, Holden attended Pasadena Junior College, where he became involved in local radio plays. Contrary to legend and theatre publicity, he did not study at the Pasadena Playhouse, nor was he discovered in a play there. Rather, he was spotted by a talent scout from Paramount Pictures in 1937 while playing the part of an 80-year-old man, Marie Curie’s father-in-law, in a play at the Playbox, a separate and private theatre owned by Pasadena Playhouse director Gilmor Brown. His first film role was in Prison Farm the following year.

His first starring role was in Golden Boy, in which he played a violinist turned boxer. That was followed by the role of George Gibbs in the film adaptation of Our Town.