Essay · Film & Lives
The Girl Who Never Quite Belonged to Herself
Natalie Wood was one of the most naturally gifted actresses of the Hollywood studio era, a woman who made the transition from child star to adult performer with a completeness that almost no one manages, who received three Academy Award nominations before the age of twenty-five, and who spent her entire career navigating the gap between the person she was and the person the studio system had decided she was at the age of four. The navigation was, by any available measure, heroic, and it was also, finally, exhausting, and the life it produced was as complicated and as beautiful and as unresolved as the performances she gave in her best films, which were about exactly that: the gap, and the cost of living in it.
By Bergotte · San Francisco & Hollywood · Film & Lives
Her mother wanted to be a star. This is, in the biography of Natalie Wood, the fact from which everything else follows — the career, the marriages, the performances, the personal turbulences, the death — because the career that defined Wood’s life was not her choice but her mother’s, begun before Wood was old enough to choose anything, prosecuted with a determination that brooked no interference, and sustained by a woman who had transferred onto her daughter an ambition that the world had declined to satisfy in her own person. Maria Gurdin, born in Siberia, who had reinvented herself so thoroughly on the journey from Russia to San Francisco that she gave herself a new name and a new history at every stop, saw in her daughter’s dark eyes and natural poise the raw material of the stardom she had always imagined for herself, and she pursued it with the efficiency of someone who understands that the window for child stardom is narrow and that hesitation is not an option.
Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, the daughter of Russian immigrants who had fled the revolution and arrived in California with little except the adaptability that displacement teaches and the particular intensity of people who have already lost one world and are determined not to lose another. Her father was a carpenter and a day labourer, a gentle man of limited ambition and considerable personal appeal. Her mother was something else: a woman of fierce will and a relationship to the truth that was instrumental rather than principled, who told different stories about her background at different times and who brought to the project of her daughter’s career the same pragmatic creativity she had brought to the project of her own survival.
At four, Wood was given a bit part in a film being shot in Santa Rosa. At seven, she was noticed by the director Irving Pichel and given a role in Tomorrow Is Forever (1946). At eight, she played the doubting child in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) — the little girl who does not believe in Santa Claus and is persuaded, over the course of ninety-six minutes, that she was wrong — and the performance, which required a child to move from scepticism to wonder in a way that the camera would find credible, was accomplished with a naturalness that stopped people in their tracks. The studio executives at RKO who saw the rushes used words that executives use about child performers when they mean something more than the usual: she had something, and the something was not teachable, and they understood that they were in the presence of a genuine gift.
The Studio System and the Child It Made
The studio system of the late 1940s and 1950s was not designed with the welfare of child performers in mind. It was designed with the welfare of the studios in mind, which is a different and in most cases competing interest, and the children who moved through it — Wood, alongside Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and a generation of others who began early and paid late — were shaped by it in ways that the adults around them were either unable or unwilling to prevent. Wood spent her childhood on studio lots, educated by studio tutors in the hours when she was not needed on set, managed by a mother who was present at every professional decision and absent, in the ways that mattered most, in every other dimension. The work was real and the talent was real and the childhood, by most ordinary measures, was not.
She was, by all accounts, a straight-A student, a child of unusual intelligence who read voraciously and absorbed everything around her with the attention of someone who had learned, early and well, that the world was a performance and that reading the performance accurately was the essential survival skill. She was also a child with a profound and lifelong fear of dark water — a fear that her mother dismissed and that the film industry ignored and that would, in the end, become the fact around which everything else in her life would finally organise itself. The fear was specific and documented and real. Where it came from is unclear, though there are accounts of a childhood incident and of a fortune teller’s prediction and of the particular anxiety that water produced in her from her earliest years. She avoided it, was wary of it, did not swim well, and spent her life working around a terror that the people around her did not take seriously enough to respect.
Rebel Without a Cause and the Transition That Almost Didn’t Happen
The transition from child star to adult actress is the most treacherous passage in the Hollywood career, and Wood negotiated it with a combination of genuine talent, considerable luck, and the particular courage of someone who had decided that the alternative to the transition was worse. By 1954 she was sixteen and the studio was uncertain what to do with her — too old for the child roles that had made her useful, not yet established in the adult register that would make her bankable — and her career was in the provisional, slightly anxious state that the careers of former child stars tend to occupy at that moment.
Nicholas Ray saved it, or gave Wood the vehicle to save it herself, which amounts to the same thing. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — Ray’s film about the anguish of mid-century American adolescence, about the gap between what parents expected and what children felt and the violence that accumulated in the gap — required a young actress capable of embodying genuine emotional extremity without the protection of adult technique, and Wood, who had been performing since she was four and had never been trained in the conventional sense, brought to it something that training tends to remove: the direct channel between feeling and expression, the capacity to be in the emotion rather than representing it. Her Judy — the teenage girl whose desire for her father’s love has curdled into a performance of delinquency that she herself barely understands — is one of the finest performances in 1950s American cinema, and it earned her the first of her three Academy Award nominations.
James Dean was in Rebel Without a Cause, and the friendship that developed between them on set — two young people of unusual sensitivity and unusual vulnerability, operating in an industry that valued neither of those things for their own sake — is one of the more poignant connections of the period. Dean died in a car accident in September 1955, before the film was released, and Wood mourned him with the intensity of someone who had lost a person who understood something about her situation that most people around her did not. She spoke of him throughout her life with a particular tenderness, the tenderness one reserves for those who recognised you before you recognised yourself.
“Acting is not important. Einstein is important. Jonas Salk is important. I know they’re not going to send my latest movie up in a time capsule.” — Natalie Wood, in interview
Splendor in the Grass and the Director Who Found What Was There
The years between Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass (1961) were professionally uneven — a series of films that ranged from the competent to the mediocre, a studio contract that was simultaneously a resource and a constraint, a marriage to Robert Wagner that began in 1957 with the fairy-tale quality of a union between two of Hollywood’s most beautiful people and developed, over five years, the complications that fairy tales tend not to advertise. By 1960, Wood’s career was in genuine trouble — she had been called “washed up” by people in a position to make the designation stick — and it was Elia Kazan who reversed it, as Kazan reversed so many careers during that decade, by the simple method of understanding what was already there and creating the conditions in which it could be fully expressed.
Kazan saw in Wood what he described as “a true-blue quality with a wanton side that is held down by social pressure” — which is both a precise description of what Wood brought to her best performances and a precise description of what her life had required her to suppress. He cast her as Wilma Dean Loomis in Splendor in the Grass — the young Kansas woman whose desire for Bud Stamper is so intense and so culturally unacceptable that its suppression drives her to breakdown — and he drew from her a performance of such emotional truth and such physical commitment that it stands, four decades later, as the fullest realisation of what she was capable of. The breakdown scenes — Wilma’s descent into the hysteria that the repression of her own nature has produced — are among the most sustained and most demanding pieces of screen acting of the period, and Wood accomplished them with a completeness that Kazan later said required no direction in its final stage: she knew exactly what was required and she gave it.
Warren Beatty, playing Bud, was making his screen debut. The attraction between the two actors was real and the relationship that developed during filming was real, and the film carries the charge of both — the on-screen and the off-screen desire operating simultaneously, each intensifying the other, the camera catching something between the actors that neither could have produced without the other. Wood divorced Wagner in 1962, in part as a consequence of the Beatty relationship. The personal and the professional were, in her life, never cleanly separable.
Maria, Gypsy, and the Musical Films
West Side Story (1961) — released in the same year as Splendor in the Grass, in one of the more remarkable single-year achievements in American film acting — gave Wood a role of a different kind: Maria, the Puerto Rican girl whose love for Tony crosses the gang boundaries that the film’s American tragedy is built around. The casting was controversial then and remains controversial now — Wood was neither Puerto Rican nor Latina, and the decision to cast her while dubbing her singing voice was of a piece with the film industry’s systematic preference for white performers in roles that required authenticity of experience the performers did not have. The controversy is legitimate, and it does not entirely settle the question of what Wood does with the role: she plays Maria with a warmth and a vulnerability that the film requires and that she brings genuinely, and the performance, within the constraints of what it was asked to do, is accomplished.
Gypsy (1962) — in which she played Gypsy Rose Lee, the burlesque performer and memoirist whose relationship with her stage mother was one of the great toxic bonds in American show business — is the film that critics who know Wood’s work tend to reach for when they want to make the case for her as an actress of genuine range and genuine intelligence. The role is the most knowing of her career — a woman who has been performing since childhood, who has been shaped by an ambitious mother’s vision of what she should be, who must find within herself, eventually, the person who exists beneath the performance — and Wood played it with an understanding of the material that was clearly personal. The film was, in every sense that matters, about her own situation, and she understood that, and the understanding produced something that exceeded the demands of the role.
The Personal Life and Its Turbulences
The marriages are the part of Wood’s life that the public narrative has always reached for most readily, partly because the visual of Wood and Robert Wagner as Hollywood’s golden couple was so compelling and partly because the dissolution and the reconnection and the final circumstances are so imbued with the quality of tragedy. They married first in 1957, when she was nineteen and he was twenty-seven, and they were, as a couple, the thing that Hollywood in the late 1950s most needed couples to be: beautiful and apparently happy and entirely photogenic. The marriage was also, beneath the surface that the publicity photographs presented, more complicated and less stable than the photographs suggested.
They divorced in 1962. Wood went through a period of personal difficulty — relationships with Warren Beatty, with others, a suicide attempt in 1966 that she later spoke about with the directness of someone who had decided that the alternative to honesty about her own history was a form of self-betrayal she was not willing to commit. She paid Warner Brothers $175,000 to be released from her contract, a sum that represented both the seriousness of her distress and the seriousness of her commitment to managing her own professional life on her own terms. She entered therapy, which she maintained throughout the rest of her life and which she credited with the degree of equanimity she achieved in her later years.
She married Richard Gregson in 1969, had a daughter, Natasha, and divorced him in 1972. She returned to Robert Wagner, married him again, and had a daughter, Courtney. The second marriage was, by the accounts of those who knew them in those years, genuinely happier than the first — more settled, more honest, the two people it contained older and less invested in the performance of the fairy tale and more capable of the actual relationship beneath it. She focused on her daughters, took on fewer professional commitments, appeared in television productions that were well-received without being transformative, won a Golden Globe for the miniseries From Here to Eternity in 1979. The life she led in those final years was, by her own account, the one she had chosen and would have chosen again.
The Water and the Night of November 28, 1981
She was afraid of dark water her whole life. This is the fact that every account of Natalie Wood’s death reaches for first, because its irony is too precise to be avoided and too painful to linger over. On the night of November 28, 1981, she was aboard the yacht Splendour off the coast of Catalina Island, with her husband Robert Wagner and her Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken. In the early hours of November 29th, she went into the water. Her body was found the following morning, floating near a dinghy, wearing a down jacket, her socks still on. She was forty-three years old.
The official cause of death was listed as accidental drowning for thirty years. In 2012 it was reclassified as undetermined. In 2018, following a renewed investigation, it was reclassified again as suspicious. What happened in the hours before Wood entered the water has been disputed ever since, and the dispute has generated a significant amount of journalistic and legal attention, and the attention has not resolved anything, and the unresolved quality of it — the fact that the most basic questions about how and why a woman with a lifelong terror of dark water came to be in dark water on a November night — is itself a form of violence against the person it concerns, the reduction of a life and a career of genuine substance to a mystery that the living are unable or unwilling to solve.
The film she was making when she died — Brainstorm, a science fiction drama about a device that records and transmits human experience — was released posthumously in 1983, her unfinished scenes edited with care by the director Douglas Trumbull, who dedicated the film to her. There is something in the subject of the film — the recording and transmission of experience, the question of what survives the death of the person who had the experience — that sits, uncomfortably and unavoidably, alongside the circumstances of its making.
What She Did and What It Cost
The critical tradition on Natalie Wood has always acknowledged her beauty — it is, after all, one of the primary facts about her, and the camera’s response to it was one of the primary facts of her career — while being somewhat uncertain about her talent, which is the combination that tends to be produced when a woman’s appearance is striking enough to distract from everything else. The uncertainty is not justified by the work. The work at its best — Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, Love with the Proper Stranger, Gypsy — is the work of an actress of genuine and specific gifts: the capacity to inhabit emotional extremity without the protection of technique, the quality of presence that makes the camera believe what it is seeing, and, in the later work, an intelligence about her own situation that gave her performances a resonance that exceeded what the material alone could produce.
She was also a woman who had been working since she was four years old, who had been shaped by her mother’s ambition and the studio system’s requirements before she was old enough to know that shaping was happening, and who spent the rest of her life trying to determine what she actually was beneath everything that had been placed on top of her. The films that show her doing this most clearly are the best films, the ones where the role and the person are in genuine dialogue, where what Kazan or Nicholas Ray put on screen was not merely Wood performing but Wood being revealed, the true-blue quality and the wanton side and everything in between made visible for ninety minutes before the lights come back up and the performance resumes.
She was afraid of dark water, and she was brave about most other things, and the bravery produced a career and a life of genuine substance that deserves to be discussed on its own terms rather than primarily in relation to the circumstances of its ending. She was not a mystery. She was a person, fully and specifically herself, operating in conditions that were not always of her choosing and producing from those conditions work that was, at its best, entirely her own.
This essay draws on Suzanne Finstad’s biography Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood (2001), published interviews with Wood across her career, Elia Kazan’s autobiography A Life (1988), and the documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (dir. Laurent Bouzereau, 2020). Natalie Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California, and died November 29, 1981, off Santa Catalina Island, California. She received Academy Award nominations for Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961), and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).
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