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Natalie Wood (July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981)
Her mother soon moved their family to Los Angeles to pursue a career for the young talent. Her parents changed their surname to "Gurdin", and by the age of 4 she was billed as Natasha Gurdin. Her mother tightly managed and controlled the young girl's career and personal life from her start in films at the age of five. She starred in multiple films as a child including both Miracle on 34th Street and The Ghost and Mrs Muir in 1947. Her father is described by Wood's biographers as a passive alcoholic who went along with his wife's demands. Her sister, Lana Wood, is also an actress, notably a Bond girl, and was featured in a Playboy pictorial (she was not, however, a Playmate). She had another sister, Olga.
At age sixteen, Natalie won the role of Judy in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, co-starring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Dennis Hopper. Most biographers say that she slept with Ray and Hopper in order to advance her career, and that her mother engaged her teenaged daughter to do this. Wood became one of the relatively few child stars to make the transition to adult stardom. By the time she was 25, she was already a three-time Oscar nominee, for Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass and Love With the Proper Stranger.
Another of her widely noted films was the Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise musical West Side Story, in which she played Maria. Wood was initially signed to do her own singing, but in the end, she was dubbed by professional singer Marni Nixon, which is said to have disappointed her. Nonetheless, she enjoyed worldwide celebrity status, comparable to that of Elizabeth Taylor. Her own singing voice was used when she played the title role in the 1962 film Gypsy, and she also starred with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in the slapstick comedy, The Great Race in 1965. As a restless on-screen companion of James Dean and an off-screen date of Elvis Presley, she was much admired and envied by the young girls of the day. She once stated about Elvis, "He can sing, but he can’t do much else.
Although critically acclaimed for her work and despite her box office success, her acting was also criticised by many, and in 1966 she won the Harvard Lampoon Worst Actress of the Year award. She was the first performer in the awards history to accept in person winning respect from the institution for being such a good sport.
After appearing in the hit film, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969, she retreated from the spotlight in order to start a family, working sporadically in films and TV movies until her death.
Among the men Wood frequently dated were singer Elvis Presley and actors Raymond Burr, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Nick Adams, Tab Hunter, Michael Caine and Scott Marlowe.
According to Mary F. Pols, the teenaged Wood went on studio-arranged dates, often with closeted gay actors. In 1956, one of these was Tab Hunter, seven years her senior, with whom she developed a genuine friendship. They would attend parties to promote the two films they co-starred in that year, The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind. Wood biographer and Hollywood screenwriter Gavin Lambert also confirms that Wood had studio-arranged dates with homosexual or bisexual actors, the first of which was with Nick Adams. Hunter in his autobiography elaborates on how a Hollywood studio's publicization of a sham romance between two actors each under contract to it was a strategy to stimulate public desire for seeing that studio's forthcoming films. The demographic segment he in particular appealed to was the newly influential teenage girl market segment, since he had swiftly established himself as a leading "heartthrob" for that demographic.
According to Lambert and his reviewer David Ehrenstein, Wood financially supported homosexual playwright Mart Crowley in a manner that made it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band
Concerning a possible relationship between Wood and allegedly homosexual actor Raymond Burr, 21 years her senior, Wood's biographer, Suzanne Finstad, cites Dennis Hopper as saying, "I just can't wrap my mind around that one. But you know, I saw them together. They were definitely a couple. Who knows what was going on there."
Gavin Lambert wrote that, contrary to popular belief, Wood's casting in Rebel Without a Cause did not lead to a romance with co-star James Dean: "Like many people, she was fascinated by his charm. He had this magnetic quality on the screen and in life... They got on very well, they liked each other a lot." However, most biographers write that she slept with Hopper and director Nicholas Ray. Lambert added that both Dean and Ray helped renew her passion for acting after a diet of lackluster movies like Chicken Every Sunday, Dear Brat and Father Was a Fullback.
Wood's two marriages to actor Robert Wagner were publicized and stormy, but they were reconciled at the time of her death. According to Suzanne Finstad, she ended her first marriage to Wagner after she caught him "in a compromising position with another man." Wagner is aware of Finstad's claim, and he has called it untrue.
On November 29, 1981, at the age of 43, Wood drowned while the yacht she and Wagner owned, The Splendor, was anchored near Catalina Island. An investigation by Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi resulted in an official verdict of accidental drowning, although speculation about the circumstances continues.
Wood was on board the yacht with Wagner and Christopher Walken. The couple invited Walken to join them during a Thanksgiving break from filming the science-fiction screenplay Brainstorm. In September and October, they filmed on location in Raleigh, North Carolina. North Carolina had recently become known to Hollywood executives as an excellent production site. Wood and her husband stayed together in Raleigh for weeks without causing any trouble or negative rumors in the vicinity of her filming location.(Wagner was on a break from filming his Aaron Spelling-produced hit TV series Hart to Hart.) They then returned to California where Wood and Walken, who co-starred in the project, shot love scenes several days before Thanksgiving on an MGM soundstage. Mart Crowley, employed as Natalie's personal assistant since 1960, accompanied her to North Carolina. He then joined the actress, her mother, sisters, and Wagner for Thanksgiving dinner in Los Angeles, but he declined Natalie's invitation to spend the holiday weekend on the yacht.
Anchored in the Pacific Ocean on the Saturday night of the holiday weekend, Wagner and Walken reportedly had a loud argument about how Walken was behaving around Wood on the yacht and possibly in a Catalina Island restaurant where they all partied earlier that day. Wood apparently tried either to leave the yacht or to secure a dinghy that was banging against the hull when she accidentally slipped and fell overboard. A woman on a nearby yacht said she heard cries for help from the water at around midnight, along with voices replying "Take it easy. We'll be over to get you." The woman, a commodities broker who had never met Wood, Wagner, or Walken, said this "call and response" continued for more than 15 minutes. She added that the woman who kept repeating "Help me" did it in a curiously flat, unemotional tone of voice. To quote the witness directly, "There just wasn't much credibility in that droning repetition." For that reason the commodities broker did nothing, and said that she felt "a lot of guilt" when she learned that Wood had drowned.
Wagner has always refused to discuss the events of that night. Walken said in a New York Times interview in 1992 that there was no argument and that neither he nor Wagner witnessed Wood's fall. He added that her small physical stature (five feet tall) was a major factor in the accident. The skipper of the yacht, Dennis Davern, videotaped a rambling and confusing interview in 1992 for the TV documentary program Now It Can Be Told, hosted by Geraldo Rivera. At one point during the interview, his girlfriend, who never met any of the yacht's passengers, appears to goad him into making an accusation, and Davern hesitates.
Of the three witnesses who have talked, only the commodities broker told her story to the media without being pressed and within a reasonable amount of time. She gave reporters her whole story less than two days after Wood's body was discovered; Walken and Davern both waited more than ten years to say anything.
Dr. Noguchi revealed that Wood was legally intoxicated when she died and that there were marks and bruises on her body, which could have been received as a result of her fall. In Noguchi's memoir, Coroner, he stated that had Natalie not been intoxicated, she likely would have realized that her heavy down-filled coat and wool sweater were pulling her underwater, and would have removed them. Noguchi said he found Natalie's fingernails still embedded in the rubber boat's side.
At the time of her death Wood was filming Brainstorm. Released in theaters two years later without a climactic scene that Wood was scheduled to film the week after Thanksgiving, it turned out to be a box-office disaster. Wood was also scheduled to make her stage debut in an Ahmanson Theatre production of Anastasia, opposite Dame Wendy Hiller. She was scheduled to begin rehearsals shortly after wrapping Brainstorm.
She is buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. She was survived by her husband, Robert Wagner, and two daughters, Natasha Gregson Wagner (from her marriage to Richard Gregson), and Courtney Wagner, her daughter with Robert Wagner. Other survivors included her stepdaughter Katie Wagner (from Robert Wagner's previous marriage to Marion Marshall), her sister, Lana Wood, sister Olga Virapaeff, and her mother. Lana Wood later published a biography about Natalie.
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