Wynter was born in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of Dr. Peter Winter, a British surgeon of German descent, and his wife Jutta Oarda, a native of Hungary.
She grew up in Britain. When she was 16, her father visited friends in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today), fell in love with the country, and brought his daughter and her stepmother to live with him there.
Dana Wynter (as she called herself and pronounced Donna)[citation needed] later enrolled at South Africa's Rhodes University in 1949. She studied medicine while also pursuing theatre, playing the blind girl in a school production of Through a Glass Darkly, a role in which she said she had been "terrible". After a year of studies, she returned to Britain and turned to acting.

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