Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,746

This is the grave of Natalie Wood.

Born in 1938 in San Francisco, Natalie Zacharenko grew up there, the grandchild on her mother’s side of rich Russians who escaped the Revolution. Her father had escaped the Revolution himself, but he was a carpenter who had fought for the Whites and had managed to get out. Both sides had gone through China to do so. Her parents conceived her out of wedlock and so got married whether they wanted to or not. She was born 5 months after their marriage. Her father changed the family name to Gurdin after they settled in Santa Rosa, I guess to Americanize them, although that’s not a super common name either.

Anyway, Natalie was a cute kid and her parents were ambitious for her and she started appearing in small roles in films when she was young. She became a child actor and RKO executives changed her name to Wood to be super American. Her first film role was in 1943, in the adaptation of Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. She was 4 years old. Irving Pichel directed that and then gave her a tiny role in another film. He thought she was good on screen–and my God, go back and watch child acting in this era, it was so, so horrible–and so convinced her mother to move to Los Angeles. She got cast opposite Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert in Tomorrow is Forever, from 1946. She was then Gene Tierney’s daughter in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, from 1947. Basically she spent the next several years in standard daughter roles in a huge variety of films, mostly bad, but some OK. Just standard Hollywood stuff of the studio era.

What really made Wood a star was getting the lead daughter role in the early ABC sitcom, The Pride of the Family, in 1953. That got her the big roles in the movies. This of course leads us to Rebel without a Cause, perhaps the iconic movie of the 1950s, in 1955. That catapulted James Dean into icon status, even more than Wood, but it catapulted her pretty far up the ladder too. On top of it, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Then John Ford cast her in The Searchers, a film that I maintain is as racist in its own way as Birth of a Nation, where Wood played the girl being searched for by John Wayne.

The late 50s however were rough for Wood. There were some bad roles and then she started being choosy and refusing to take what the studio gave her. That led Warner Brothers to suspend her contract. In fact, she came very close to being the kind of young ingenue wonder that has a couple of great roles and then is completely forgotten about. What saved her was a combination of hard work and luck. She took her acting very seriously and worked hard to improve it. She was deeply moved by seeing Elia Kazan’s film version of A Streetcar Named Desire and wanted to be the kind of actor who could do that. It so happened that Kazan thought she had huge talent too and he wanted her in Splendor in the Grass. In fact, he had to fight the studio on this, who had already given up on her. But he won, cast her with Warren Beatty, and she was great. I guess Kazan did one good thing in his post-World War II life….

After Splendor in the Grass, Wood was a big star again, The studios shrugged and went on with it. She was cast in West Side Story, which of course was a gargantuan success. She didn’t do her own singing here, but that was hardly uncommon in film productions of musicals. She did however sing the next year in Gypsy, with Rosalind Russell. She tied Teresa Wright as the youngest person with three Oscar nominations when she was nominated for Love with the Proper Stranger. Today Jennifer Lawrence and Saoirse Ronan hold that record. She was in Sex and the Single Girl and The Great Race, both with Tony Curtis, again both big hits. She became a super bankable star. Opinions on her acting varied; some thought she was terrible, but then many directors thought she was excellent.

Wood went through a personal and professional crisis in the late 60s, with her mental health being pretty bad and the movies being pretty bad too. She paid off Warners to get out of her contract. She had a comeback in 1970 with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But by this time, she mostly decided she’d only work occasionally. She went through relationships at a rapid rate; naturally she dated Jerry Brown for awhile, but then married Robert Wagner. That didn’t stop her from having a lot of affairs though. Much later, after his death, it came out that Kirk Douglas had brutally raped her when she was just a teenager in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and it is widely believed that she never really mentally recovered from that horror.

Most of Wood’s later work was in support of Wagner’s career. They did a TV movie called The Affair together in 1973 and appeared on the NBC show Laurence Olivier Presents in 1976 with him to do Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She appeared in some of his TV shows too, including Hart to Hart, but these were just one-off roles. She did a very small amount of additional work too, mostly forgettable, as Meteor and The Last Married Couple in America. She did a couple of TV movies, including a remake of From Here to Eternity, with Kim Basinger and William Devane.

In 1981, she and Wagner were on their motorboat, when she mysteriously fell over and drowned. Did Wagner kill her? Maybe. I’d say from what I know of the case–which I grant you is not a ton as this kind of true crime sensational case from the past doesn’t interest me much–it seems more probable than not that he did kill her. In any case, Wagner got away with whatever he did, even thought the taint of it remains with him today (hey, he’s still alive??? 94, huh). She actually was working at this time, doing a film called Brainstorm that co-starred Christopher Walken. They deleted her scenes and released the film but it didn’t do much. She was about to go on stage for the first time too. Alas, we won’t know what kind of older actress Wood would have been.

Wood was 43 years old when she died.

Natalie Wood is buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other people nominated for Academy Awards for films made in 1955, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Joe Mantell, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Marty, is in Hollywood. Arthur O’Connell, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Picnic, is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.