Natalie Wood

Born in San Francisco as Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, three-time Oscar-nominated actress Natalie Wood (b. 1938–d. 1981) began her career at age four with an uncredited role in Irving Pichel’s Happy Land (1943). Natalia’s Russian father, a carpenter and eventual studio set builder, changed the family name to Gurdin for better placement on Depression job lists. Claiming to be an amateur ballet dancer and/or actress in her native Russia, Natalia’s mother became the driving force behind her daughter’s career. She moved her family from Santa Rosa to Hollywood in 1944, hoping to persuade Pichel to again cast Natalia, who preferred the name Natasha. Fond of Natasha and aware of the difficulties child actors endured, Pichel only reluctantly cast the seven-year-old in Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) and re-christened her “Natalie Wood.” Natalie’s popularity took hold at age nine with her role in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), followed by twenty-eight movie and television performances before emerging as a teenage star in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean. During her teenage and early adult career, Wood’s most prominent roles mediated cultural anxieties over female sexuality and maturation, with allegorical resonance for audiences who had watched this compelling child grow up onscreen. Most notable are The Searchers and A Cry in the Night, both 1956, which cast Wood as a kidnapping victim, and later Bombers B-52 (1957), Marjorie Morningstar (1958), Cash McCall (1960), Splendor in the Grass, and West Side Story (both 1961). Wood’s Louise in Gypsy (1962) literally effects a transition from innocent, soulful girl to illustrious stripper. Even when Wood was in her mid- and late twenties, her roles hinged on a nuanced interplay of sexual innocence and experience, whether in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), Sex and the Single Girl (1964), or This Property Is Condemned (1966). Her last big hit, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), treated adult sexual ennui and experimentation in the explicit and hilarious terms possible only with the demise of the Production Code and the studio system that supported it. Throughout her career, Wood acted in more than sixty movies and television series, concluding with Brainstorm (1983), released two years after her untimely, still mysterious death by drowning. Her uncommon beauty and deep, brown eyes registered intelligence, sincerity, and an inexplicable vulnerability, qualities animating her ever-captivating screen performances and frequently commented upon by critics, scholars, and biographers alike.