Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, better known as Natalie Wood, was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California. She was always going to be amazing.
She would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most famous and loved actresses, winning over fans with her beauty, talent, and charm.
Natalie’s path into the world of entertainment began when she was just four years old and starred in a Christmas play.
Maria Zakharenko, her mother, saw how talented she was and made sure she got acting classes. This laid the groundwork for what would become a great career.
When she was eight years old, she had her big break in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which got her an Academy Award nomination.
Natalie’s evident ability shone through her adolescent years in movies like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), when she starred with James Dean, and West Side Story (1961), where she played the famous character Maria.
Wood was the lead in the musical movie Gipsy (1962) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her roles in Splendour in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963).
She went on to make movies like Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).
In the 1970s, Wood took a break from acting in movies and had two daughters: one with her second husband, Richard Gregson, and one with her first husband, Robert Wagner, whom she married again after divorcing Gregson.
She only acted in two feature films during the decade, but she was in a few more television shows, including a version of From Here to Eternity (1979), for which she earned a Golden Globe Award.
Wood’s movies were a “coming of age” for her and for Hollywood movies in general.
Some critics say that her movie career shows what it’s like to be a modern American woman in transition because she was one of the rare actresses to play both kid and middle-aged characters.
On November 29, 1981, at the age of 43, Wood drowned in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Catalina Island during a break from production of her would-be comeback film Brainstorm (1983).
She was with her husband Wagner and Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken.
The events surrounding her death have been the subject of conflicting witness statements, prompting the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, under the instruction of the coroner’s office, to list her cause of death as “drowning and other undetermined factors” in 2012.
(Photo credit: Pinterest / Wikimedia Commons).
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