Natalie Wood
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Best films:
Elia Kazan's Splendor In The Grass (1961), Blake Edwards's The Great Race (1965) Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Richard Quine's Sex And Single Girl (1965) Robert Mulligan's Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) | Links: |
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Natalie Wood (born Zacharenko from Russian immigrants in 1938), already a
Hollywood child star after
George Seaton's
Miracle on 34th Street (1947), was in high demand as a teenager, both
in cinema and on television.
While still in high school (at Van Nuys High School, the same one attended by Robert Redford), she graduated to more profound roles in
Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955),
Frank Tuttle's film noir A Cry in the Night (1956),
Stuart Heisler's western The Burning Hills (1956) and
David Butler's comedy The Girl He Left Behind (1956).
Legend has it that at 14 she was already dating men in their 40s, including
Elizabeth Taylor's ex-husband.
She had a minor role in John Ford's The Searchers (1956) but a major one
in Irving Rapper's Marjorie Morningstar (1958) and in Delmer Daves' war movie Kings Go Forth (1958).
She dated Elvis Presley and ran away with a "teenage idol".
She came to represent the troubled youth of the era after
Elia Kazan's Splendor In The Grass (1961), in which she played a sexually-frustrated teenager,
Robert Wise's musical West Side Story (1961),
Mervyn LeRoy's Gypsy (1962) in which she played a stripper,
Robert Mulligan's Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), in which she
plays an abortion-seeking single woman, but
she also excelled at farces like
Richard Quine's Sex And Single Girl (1965), in which she played a virginal sexologist, and
Blake Edwards's The Great Race (1965), in which she played
a proudly independent suffragette.
Meanwhile, her private life was the gossip of Hollywood, and not only for
the many love affairs: she was also a shrewed business woman who opened an
investment company and started collecting art.
She was no longer the "ingenue" or the "girl next door" but simply a
multi-talented actress, with increasingly complex roles in
Mulligan's Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and
Sydney Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966).
She was so self-assurd that she refused to play in
Gene Saks' Barefoot in the Park (1967), replaced by Jane Fonda,
and
Arthur Penn's Bonnie And Clyde (1967), replaced by Faye Dunaway,
despite the fact that both films featured close friends (respectively, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty).
Her last major film was Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969),
which is about the sexual revolution that she herself had pioneered.
She remarried her first husband Robert Wagner and they starred together in
Gilbert Cates' The Affair (1973), in which she played a polio-stricken songwriter,
and in Laurence Olivier's adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), both made for television, a sign that she truly cared for her marriage this time.
Unfortunately, her mental health was rapidly declining. Aware of it, she
played the frustrated housewife in the TV mini-series From Here to Eternity (1979),
a mad housewife in Burt Brinckerhoff's The Cracker Factory (1979),
and a hallucinating woman in The Memory of Eva Ryker (1980),
all television movies.
She drowned in 1981 at the age of 43.
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