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Natalie Wood Biography |
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| Natalie Wood was an American film actress. Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko in San Francisco, California, to Russian Orthodox immigrants, Nikolai and Maria Zakharenko. She starred in multiple films as a child including Miracle on 34th Street 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. At 16, Natalie was awarded the role of Judy in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, co-starring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Dennis Hopper, signalling the start of her adult acting career. Most biographers claim that she slept with Ray and Hopper. Wood was one of the relatively few child stars to make a successful transition to adult stardom. By the time she was 28, she was already a three-time Oscar nominee, with nominations for Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass and Love With the Proper Stranger. Another of her widely noted films was the Leonard Bernstein 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 caused her disappointment. Nonetheless, she enjoyed worldwide celebrity, comparable to that of Elizabeth Taylor. 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. 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. In 1981, at the age of forty-three, Wood drowned while their yacht The Splendor was anchored at Catalina Island. An investigation by Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi resulted in an official verdict of accidental drowning, although speculation about the circumstances continued. Wood was on board the yacht with Wagner and actor Christopher Walken. There were reports Wagner and Walken had a loud argument and Wood apparently tried to either leave the yacht or to secure a dinghy that was banging against the hull when she accidentally slipped and fell overboard. A woman on shore said she heard cries for help from the water that night, along with voices replying "we're coming." Wagner, Walken, and the pilot of the Splendor said they heard nothing. Noguchi revealed that Wood was legally intoxicated when she died and there were marks and bruises on her body, which could have been received as a result of her fall. At the time of her death Wood was filming Brainstorm and preparing to make her stage debut in a Los Angeles production of Anastasia, opposite Dame Wendy Hiller. She is buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. She was survived by her husband, Robert Wagner, and two daughters, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and Courtney Wagner, her daughter with Robert Wagner. Other survivors included her stepdaughter Katie Wagner, her sister, Lana Wood, and her mother. Lana Wood later published a biography of Natalie. | |||||||||||||
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