Natalie Wood

At 43 years old, Natalie Wood has this physical status:

Natalie Wood (born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko; January 20, 1938 – September 29, 1981) was an American actress who began her film career as an infant and became a Hollywood actor as a young adult.

Before she was 25, Wood received three Oscar nominations.

She began acting in films at the age of 4 and was given a co-starring role in Miracle on 34th Street (1947).

She received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), followed by a role in John Ford's The Searchers (1956).

She appeared in the film West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962), and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her appearances in Splendor (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).

Her career spanned film (1964), Inside Daisy Clover (1964), and Bob & Alice (1969). Wood was born in San Francisco to Russian immigrant parents.

She began a hiatus from film in the 1970s and had two children with husband Robert Wagner, who died and remarried after divorced divorced her second husband.

She appeared in only three films over the decade, but she did appear in several television series, including a sequel to the film From Here to Eternity (1979), for which she received a Golden Globe Award.

Her films were a "coming of age" for her and Hollywood films in general.

Wood's cinematic career, according to critics, was a portrait of modern American womanhood in transition, as she was one of the few to have both child roles and roles of middle-aged characters on Catalina Island.

"Drowning and other undetermined causes" in 2012, as "drowning and other undetermined causes" were relayed in the events surrounding her death.

Wagner was named as a person of concern in the ongoing probe into her death in 2018.

Early life

Wood was born Natalie Zacharenko (1908–1980), a San Francisco, California, to Maria Zudilova (1908–1998), also known as Mary, Marie and Musia, and her second husband, Nicholas Zakharenko (né Nikolai/Nikolay Zakharenko, 1912-1980).

Maria Zudilova was born in 1908 in Barnaul, southern Siberia. Her maternal grandfather owned soap and candle factories, as well as a city estate. His family left Russia, settling as refugees in Harbin, China, as a result of the Russian Civil War. Maria married Alexander Tatuloff, an Armenian mechanic, in 1925, and they had a daughter, Olga (1928–2015). In 1930, the Tatuloffs immigrated to America by sea and divorced in 1936.

Nikolai/Nikolay (later Nicholas) Zakharenko, Wood's father, was born in Ussuriysk (then referred to as Nikolskoye). In a street war in Vladivostok between the Red Army and White Russian soldiers, her paternal grandfather, a chocolate factory worker who served with the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces during the war, was killed. His widow and three sons fled to Shanghai after Wood's paternal grandmother's remarriage in 1927. By 1933, the couple had migrated to the United States. Maria Tatuloff, a four-year-old senior, married Nicholas Tatuloff while her first husband was still married to her first husband.

Wood's parents were married in February 1938, five months before she was born. They bought a house in Santa Rosa, where Natalie was spotted by members of a crew during a film shoot downtown in 1942. Since Natalie began acting as a child, RKO Radio Pictures' studio executives, David Lewis and William Goetz, referred to director Sam Wood, changed her last name to Wood. Svetlana Gurdin, Wood's only full sibling, was born in Santa Monica in 1946 (the family's surname had changed their surname). Lana Wood, a.k.a. Lana Wood, became a well-known actress.

Personal life

Wood's two marriages to actor Robert Wagner were widely publicized. When Wood was 19 years old, they married in Scottsdale, Arizona, on December 28, 1957. The couple announced their divorce in a joint press release on June 20, 1961, but they divorced ten months later on April 27, 1962.

Wood dated Warren Beatty, Michael Caine, and David Niven Jr. after this starter marriage. She had also broken bread with Venezuelan shoe manufacturer Ladislav Blatnik in 1965.

Wood married British singer Richard Gregson after being in love for almost three years. Natasha, the daughter of a 1970s child, was born on September 29, 1970. Wood filed for divorce from Gregson on August 4, 1971, and it was accepted on April 12, 1972.

Wood revived her romance with Wagner at the end of January 1972, following a brief flirtation with future California governor Jerry Brown. They remarried onboard the Ramblin' Rose, anchored off the coast of Malibu's Paradise Cove. Courtney, their daughter's name, was born on March 9, 1974.

Donald G. Wilson, a former FBI agent, said he and Wood had a four-year affair that started when she was pregnant with Courtney Wagner from 1973 to 1977. Wilson appeared on camera in a documentary for cable network Reelz in 2016.

Wood told his grandmother, a Avalon socialite, that she was going to divorce Wagner and that he himself saw Wood the morning before she vanished, according to celebrity bodyguard Kris Herzog.

Suzanne Finstad's 2001 biography of Wood alleges that she was assaulted by a popular actor when she was 16, although Finstad did not identify the assassinant. Finstad said the recollection of Wood's close friends, which included actors Scott Marlowe and Dennis Hopper, revealed that the film was "unique" and "desertified."

Lana Wood said in July 2018 that her sister was sexually assaulted as a youth, and that the assault took place inside the Chateau Marmont during an audition and went on "for hours." Wood's rape was brutal and brutal, according to researcher Cynthia Lucia, who investigated the attack. Lana Wood's book, "Mega Woman: My Investigation Into Natalie Wood's Mysterious Death," was published in 2021. Kirk Douglas, her sister's suspected assassination date, according to Lana Wood.

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Adult career

In Rebel, explorers, and Morningstar, Tibbetts noted that Wood's characters in Rebel, Finders, and Morningstar began to demonstrate her diverse acting styles. Her childhood "childlike sweetness" was now being mixed with a noticeable "restlessness" that was characteristic of the 1950s.

She was the leading lady to Frank Sinatra in Kings Go Forth (1958), but she left roles and was placed on suspension by Warners. This went on for a year before being suspended in February 1959. In Cash McCall (1960), she returned to be the leading lady to James Garner. Wood lost steam after being seen in the box office flop All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960) failed. Wood's career was during a transition period, with no one appearing as a child or as a teenager before.

"She was changed, in awe of director Elia Kazan and of Vivien Leigh's performance [who] became a role model for Natalie," biographer Suzanne Finstad said on Wednesday. "One's presence in one's life made it likely that one's sensibility could identify a person as a kind of perpetrator," Tibbetts wrote.

According to author Douglas Rathgeb, her career was already in decline after a "series of bad films." She was then cast in Splendor in the Grass (1961) with Warren Beatty. In his 1997 memoir, Kazan said that the "sages" of film culture had her "washed up" as an actress, but he still wanted to talk to her about his next film.

Wood was cast as the female lead in Splendor by Kazan, and her career followed her. Despite her earlier innocent appearances, she felt she had the talent and maturity to go beyond them. Beatty's character was denied sexual attraction with Wood's character in the film, and as a result, Beatty's character became a second, "looser" girl. After a complete breakdown was committed to a mental hospital, Wood's character could not cope with the sexuality, and a juvenile institution was sent. "She clings to things with her eyes," a characteristic he found in Wood's character.

"Working with Kazan brought her to her highest emotional peak of her career, and she was unaware that Wood had never been trained in method acting methods." Natalie's experience was enthralling, but it was also sad for her as she faced her demons on Splendor." "Kazan's magic," she says, resulted in a hysteria in Natalie that may have been her most memorable scene as an actress. "Kazan and Natalie were a wonderful marriage," actor Gary Lockwood said, "because you had this gorgeous girl and you had someone that could get stuff out of her." The last one in Kazan's film was her favorite scene, when Wood goes back to see her lost first love, Bud (Beatty). "It's terribly touching to me." "I still love it when I see it," wrote Kazan.

Wood was nominated for the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her role in Splendor.

In West Side Story, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's 1961 film of the stage musical, which was a critical and box-office hit, Wood played Maria, a restless Puerto Rican girl on the West Side of Manhattan. Tibbetts spoke about how Tibbetts' character in this film and the earlier Rebellion were similar. She was to portray "the restlessness of American youth in the 1950s," as shown by youth clubs and juvenile delinquency, as well as early rock and roll. Both films, he says, were "modern allegories based on the 'Romeo and Juliet' theme, which included personal anxiety and public alienation. Where in Rebel, she falls in love with James Dean's gang-like peers and a ferocious temper alienated him from his family. In West Side Story, she enters a relationship with a white former gang member whose threatening world of outcasts has also alienated him from lawful conduct."

Despite the fact that Wood's singing in the film was narrated by Marni Nixon, West Side Story is still considered one of Wood's finest films.

Wood appeared in the film Gypsy (1962) with Rosalind Russell as the lead. "She was the most machine-tooled of Hollywood ingénues" after her appearance in the film, according to critic Pauline Kael.

Wood received her third Academy Award nomination for Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), making Wood (along with Teresa Wright) the youngest individual to receive three Oscar nominations. Jennifer Lawrence in 2013 and Saoirse Ronan in 2017, both of whom received their third nominations at the age of 23.

Wood appeared on two comedies, Sex and the Single Girl (1964), and The Great Race (1965), the latter with Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk. Maggie DuBois' ability to speak Russian was a benefit to her character Maggie DuBois in The Great Race, defending her character's coverage of the race throughout Siberia and beginning the contest as a contestant.

"When she was right for the role, there was no one better." Wood's director, Sydney Pollack, was quoted as saying about the film, "There was no one better." She was an excellent actress." Wood's latest films, Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and This Property Is Condemned (1966), both of which co-starred Robert Redford, were nominated for Best Actress. Wood suffered emotionally and sought outpatient help after the film's debut. She paid Warner Bros. $175,000 to drop her entire support staff: agents, engineers, publicist, accountant, and attorneys. She was one of Hollywood's top actresses in the 1960s, along with Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn.

Though many of Wood's films were commercially lucrative, her acting was sometimes mocked. Wood received the Harvard Lampoon Award for being the "Worst Actress of Last Year, This Year, and Next" in 1966. She was the first performer to attend their reception and receive an award in person. "She's a good sport," the Harvard Crimson wrote. Following a dissatisfied reception to Penelope (1966), Wood took a three-year break from acting. She was given a rose garden but didn't appear in it, but she wasn't a winner.

In Bob & Carol & Alice (1969), a comedy about sexual liberation, Wood co-starred with Dyan Cannon, Robert Culp, and Elliott Gould. This was the first film in which "the saving leavening of humor was brought to bear on the numerous painful scenes depicted in her adult films," Tibbetts said.

Wood did not capitalize on Bob and Carol's & Ted & Alice's popularity. Natasha Gregson, the first child of the 1970s, went into semi-retirement and appeared in only four other dramatic films during the remainder of her life. She made a brief appearance in The Candidate (1972), when she was briefly associated with Robert Redford.

Later career

Wood appeared on the screen with Robert Wagner in the week's television film The Affair (1973), and with Laurence Olivier and Wagner in a rendition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976) for the British series Laurence Olivier Presents broadcast as a special by NBC.

Peeper (1975) with Michael Caine was one of the few works she made between these two artists.

She made cameo appearances on Wagner's prime-time detective series Switch in 1978 as "Bubble Bath Girl," and Hart to Hart in 1979 as "Movie Star."

She appeared in Meteor (1979) with Sean Connery and the sex comedy The Last Married Couple in America (1980) with George Segal and Valerie Harper after a long break. Her role in the latter was praised and compared to her appearance in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Wood broke ground in Last Married Couple: Although an actress with a clean, middle-class reputation, she used the word "F" in a candid marital discussion with her husband (George Segal).

Wood had more success in television in this decade, earning high ratings and critical acclaim in 1979 for The Cracker Factory and particularly the miniseries version of From Here to Eternity (1979), starring Kim Basinger and William Devane. In 1980, Wood's appearance in the latter earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. Eva Ryker appeared in The Memory of Eva Ryker, which was her last complete work, in May 1980.

Wood, co-starring Christopher Walken and directed by Douglas Trumbull, was filming the $15 million science fiction film Brainstorm (1983) at the time of her death.

Wendy Hiller was supposed to make her stage debut in Anastasia on February 12, 1982. Wood had already purchased film rights to Barbara Wersba's Country of the Heart, and she had planned to star with Timothy Hutton in the drama about a tough-minded poet's sexual chemistry with her much younger daughter, Heather. (The text was later converted into a 1990 television film starring Jane Seymour.) With a starring role in a film adaptation of the opera, she is expected to continue her appearance on the stage as "Anastasia" on the stage. The end of Brainstorm had to be rewritten and Wood's character developed in at least three scenes, and Wood's character was drawn out of at least three scenes, but a stand-in and sound alikes were used to substitute Wood for some of Wood's most important shots. In the closing credits, the film was announced posthumously on September 30, 1983, and was dedicated to Wood.

Wood appeared in 56 films for cinema and television. "Our sexual conviction on the silver screen" was described in one of her last interviews before her death. Though critical praise for Wood had been scathing throughout her career, "she always had jobs" following her death.

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