Alex Winter

Biography

Alex Winter was born in London, to an American mother, Gregg Mayer, and an Australian father, Ross Albert Winter, both of whom were modern dancers and dance teachers, with his mother also having founded a dance troupe. His mother is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, while his father had English, German, and Irish ancestry. Alex received dance training as a child. While still a youth, he relocated with his family to St. Louis, Missouri, where his father ran the Mid-American Dance Company and where Alex studied improvisation. He made his Broadway debut in "The King and I" and spent the next several years on stage, while studying film (writing and editing) at New York University. He had co-starring roles in "Peter Pan", and the American premiere of Simon Gray's "Close of Play" at the Manhattan Theater Club. Upon graduating, he took his first major film role, in the cult vampire movie, The Lost Boys (1987). But it was two years later, that he landed the role for which he is most famous for - that of "Bill S. Preston, Esq.", who with his buddy Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) traveled through time in the cult comedy classic, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). The film was a huge success, spawning two television series and a well-received sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991). With Tom Stern, Winter co-created many influential comedy projects which he wrote, directed and starred in. Among them are the hit MTV series, The Idiot Box (1991), and the Twentieth Century Fox release, Freaked (1993), which was acclaimed by many critics, including "The New York Times" and "Entertainment Weekly", who heralded "Freaked" on their "Top Ten greatest comedies of the Nineties". The film also stars Randy Quaid, Keanu Reeves, Brooke Shields, Bobcat Goldthwait as a human sock puppet…