- published: 14 Apr 2015
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Alexander Ross "Alex" Winter (born 17 July 1965) is an English-born American actor, film director and screenwriter, best known for his role as Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the 1989 film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its 1991 sequel Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. He is also well known for his role as Marko in the 1987 cult classic The Lost Boys, and for co-writing, co-directing and starring in the 1993 film Freaked.
Winter was born in London, England. His mother, Gregg Mayer, is a New York-born American who was a former Martha Graham dancer and founded a modern-dance company in London in the mid-1960s. His father, Ross Albert Winter, was Australian and danced with Winter's mother's troupe. Winter received training in dance as a child. When he was five, his family moved to Missouri, where his father ran the Mid-American Dance Company, while his mother taught dance at Washington University in St. Louis. The two divorced in 1973.
Winter is Jewish. He was married to Sonya Dawson with whom he had a son, Leroy Winter, born in 1998. Winter maintains dual British and American citizenship.
Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American musician, songwriter, composer, record producer, actor and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock n' roll, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works, and produced almost all of the more than sixty albums he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers.
Zappa was a self-taught composer and performer, and his diverse musical influences led him to create music that was often difficult to categorize. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for 20th-century classical composers such as Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern, along with 1950s rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands; later switching to electric guitar. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. He continued this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was rock, jazz or classical.