Natalie Wood: A Life
Natalie Wood’s story could have been imagined by a Hollywood screenwriter. At age 5 she was thrusted onto the lap of a director by her zealous stage mom and received a blink-it’s-gone moment of screen time. At age 43 she was dead after a drunken night on a yacht with jealous husband Robert Wagner and potential swain Christopher Walken. In between she navigated the difficult transition from child actor to adult stardom.
Now out in paperback, Gavin Lambert’s biography Natalie Wood: A Life remains definitive. Lambert follows her family roots in the stream of refugees from Bolshevik Russia who ended in California. Little Natasha Gurin’s emotionally disordered mother, perhaps recognizing her daughter as an “instinctive performer,” began a crusade to transform her into the star we know as Natalie Wood.
From 1944 through 1957 the tireless mom-manager landed roles for her girl in 21 movies, 12 TV shows, one short-lived TV series and one radio show—most of them forgettable and long forgotten. As a child actor Wood stuck in mind only for the holiday favorite Miracle on 34th Street (1947). But as a teenager, she finally came into her own in an unforgettable, epochal film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). From there, she won big parts in major Hollywood pictures including West Side Story (1961) and Splendor in the Grass (1961).
Wood held herself together fairly well, considering her compulsive mother and the “formulaic unreal world” of the studios where she grew up. Strangely, one of the fears she carried through life was of the ocean. She died by drowning under circumstances tailored for tabloid headlines. Lambert unpacks the rumors and finds no evidence of murder or cover-up.
Throughout A Life, the author is sympathetic to Wood while bringing a critical eye to her films (few of them deserve a place in the pantheon) and a deep understanding for the workings of Hollywood.
Natalie Wood: A Life is published by University Press of Kentucky.
