Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood was an American actress. She began acting at age four and co-starred at age eight in Miracle on 34th Street. As a teenager, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause, followed by a role in John Ford's The Searchers. Wood starred in the musical films West Side Story and Gypsy and received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Splendor in the Grass and Love with the Proper Stranger. Her career continued with films such as Sex and the Single Girl, The Great Race, Inside Daisy Clover, This Property Is Condemned, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
During the 1970s, Wood began a hiatus from film and had two daughters: one with her second husband Richard Gregson, and one with Robert Wagner, her first husband whom she married again after divorcing Gregson. She acted in only two feature films throughout the decade, but she appeared slightly more often in television productions, including a remake of From Here to Eternity for which she won a Golden Globe Award. Wood's films represented a "coming of age" for her and for Hollywood films in general. Critics have suggested that her cinematic career represents a portrait of modern American womanhood in transition, as she was one of the few to take both child roles and those of middle-aged characters.
On November 29, 1981, at the age of 43, Wood drowned in the Pacific Ocean at Santa Catalina Island during a break from production of her would-be comeback film Brainstorm. She was with her husband Wagner and Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken. The events surrounding her death have been the subject of conflicting witness statements, prompting the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, under the instruction of the coroner's office, to list her cause of death as "drowning and other undetermined factors" in 2012. In 2018, Wagner was named as a person of interest in the ongoing investigation into her death.
Early life
Wood was born Natalie Zacharenko in San Francisco on July 20, 1938, to Maria Zoudilova and second husband Nicholas Zacharenko. She was of Russian and Ukrainian descent and raised in the Russian Orthodox religion. Her mother, who also used the names Mary, Marie, and Musia, was from Barnaul. Wood's maternal grandfather owned soap and candle factories, and an estate outside Barnaul. With the start of the Russian Civil War, his family fled Russia for China, settling as refugees in Harbin. Her mother was previously married to Armenian mechanic Alexander Tatuloff from 1925 to 1936. They had a daughter named Olga and moved to America by ship in 1930, before divorcing six years later.Wood's father was a carpenter from Ussuriysk. Her paternal grandfather, a chocolate factory employee who joined the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces during the war, was killed in a street fight between the Red Army and White Russian soldiers in Vladivostok. After that, his widow and three sons fled to Shanghai, relocating to Vancouver at the time of Wood's paternal grandmother's remarriage in 1927. By 1933, they moved to the United States. Nicholas met Wood's mother, four years his senior, while she was still married to Tatuloff. They were married in February 1938, five months before Wood was born.
A year after Natalie's birth, her father changed the family's surname to Gurdin. In 1942, they bought a home in Santa Rosa, California, where Wood was noticed by members of a crew during a film shoot downtown. After she started acting as a child, RKO executives David Lewis and William Goetz changed her surname to "Wood" to make it more appealing to English-speaking audiences and as a tribute to filmmaker Sam Wood. Her only full sibling, sister Svetlana, was born in Santa Monica in 1946 and later became an actress under the name Lana Wood.
Child actress
Early roles
Wood's first appearance on screen came when she was just four years old in the March 1943 release of The Moon Is Down based on the John Steinbeck book of the same name. Shortly thereafter, she was cast again in a fifteen-second scene in the film Happy Land. Despite the brief parts, she became a favorite of the director of both films, Irving Pichel. He remained in contact with Wood's family for two years, advising them when another role came up. The director telephoned Wood's mother and asked her to bring her daughter to Los Angeles for a screen test. Wood's mother became so excited that she "packed the whole family off to Los Angeles to live," writes Harris. Wood's father opposed the idea, but his wife's "overpowering ambition to make Natalie a star" took priority. According to Wood's younger sister Lana, Pichel "discovered her and wanted to adopt her."Wood, then seven years old, got the part. She played a post-World War II German orphan, opposite Orson Welles as Wood's guardian and Claudette Colbert, in Tomorrow Is Forever. When Wood was unable to cry on cue, her mother tore a butterfly to pieces in front of her to ensure she would sob for a scene. Welles later said that Wood was a born professional, "so good, she was terrifying." He also said "Natalie doesn't act from the script, she acts from the heart." Wood acted in another film directed by Pichel, The Bride Wore Boots, and went on to 20th Century Fox to play Gene Tierney's daughter in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
''Miracle on 34th Street''
Wood's best-known film as a child was Miracle on 34th Street, starring Maureen O'Hara and John Payne at Fox. She plays a cynical girl who comes to believe a kindly department store holiday-season employee portrayed by Edmund Gwenn is the real Santa Claus. The film has become a Christmas classic; Wood was counted among the top child stars in Hollywood after the film and was so popular that Macy's invited her to appear in the store's annual Thanksgiving Day parade.Film historian John C. Tibbetts wrote that for the next few years following her success in Miracle, Wood played roles as a daughter in a series of family films: Driftwood, at Republic; Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! ; Chicken Every Sunday ; The Green Promise ; Fred MacMurray's daughter in Father Was a Fullback, with O'Hara; Margaret Sullavan's daughter in No Sad Songs for Me ; the youngest sister in Our Very Own ; Never a Dull Moment ; James Stewart's daughter in The Jackpot ; Dear Brat ; Joan Blondell's neglected daughter in The Blue Veil ; The Rose Bowl Story ; Just for You ; and as the daughter of Bette Davis's character in The Star. In all, Wood appeared in over twenty films as a child. She also appeared on television in episodes of Kraft Theatre and Chevron Theatre.
Because Wood was a minor during her early years as an actress, she received her primary education on the studio lots wherever she was contracted. California law required that until age 18, child actors had to spend at least three hours per day in the classroom, notes Harris. "She was a straight A student", and one of the few child actors to excel at arithmetic. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who directed her in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, said that, "In all my years in the business, I never met a smarter moppet." Wood remembered that period in her life, saying, "I always felt guilty when I knew the crew was sitting around waiting for me to finish my three hours. As soon as the teacher let us go, I ran to the set as fast as I could."
Wood's mother continued to play a significant role in her daughter's early career, coaching her and micromanaging aspects of her career even after Wood acquired agents. As a child actress, Wood received significant media attention. By age nine, she had been named the "most exciting juvenile motion picture star of the year" by Parents magazine.
Teen stardom
In the 1953–54 television season, Wood played Ann Morrison, the teenage daughter in The Pride of the Family, an ABC situation comedy. She appeared as a teenager on episodes of The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse, Public Defender, Mayor of the Town, Four Star Playhouse, The Ford Television Theatre, and General Electric Theater, and appeared in a TV version of Heidi. She described the GE Theater episode, "Carnival," as one of the best things she ever did. She had roles in the feature films The Silver Chalice and One Desire.''Rebel Without a Cause''
Wood successfully made the transition from child star to ingénue at age 16 when she co-starred with James Dean and Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray's film about teenage rebellion. Wood had to sign to a long-term contract with Warner Bros. and she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She later said it was the first script she read that she actually wanted to do as opposed to being told to do by her parents; she also said her parents were opposed to her doing it. "Until then I did what I was told," she said. She continued to guest star on anthology TV shows like Studio One in Hollywood, Camera Three, Kings Row, Studio 57, Warner Brothers Presents, and The Kaiser Aluminum Hour. She had a small but crucial role in John Ford's The Searchers and was the female lead in A Cry in the Night.Tab Hunter and ''Marjorie Morningstar''
Wood graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1956. She signed with Warner Brothers and was kept busy during the remainder of the decade in many "girlfriend" roles, which she found unsatisfying. The studio cast her in two films opposite Tab Hunter, hoping to turn the duo into a box-office draw that never materialized: The Burning Hills, a Western, and The Girl He Left Behind. She guest starred in episodes of Conflict.Warner Bros. tried teaming her with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in Bombers B-52. Then she was given the lead in a prestigious project, Marjorie Morningstar. As Marjorie Morningstar, Wood played the role of a young Jewish girl in New York City who has to deal with the social and religious expectations of her family as she tries to forge her own path and separate identity.