The Full Biography
Natalie Wood. Actress. The San Francisco child who crossed from studio childhood into grown work without becoming a souvenir, then left a set of pictures the water has never been allowed to replace.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a girl on Santa’s lap who refuses to pretend, or a teenager in a red jacket beside James Dean, or Maria in a white dress while a gymnasium turns into a dance. The year might be 1947, or 1955, or 1961. What the still cannot show is Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko of a Russian immigrant kitchen, a stage mother who treated a daughter as a career, three Academy Award nominations, a voice in West Side Story that was largely someone else’s, two marriages to the same man, and a night off Catalina that the columns have never stopped retrying.
She was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, to Nikolai Zakharenko, a carpenter from Vladivostok, and Maria, who had come out of Siberia with an ambition the new country could be made to serve. The family names shifted — Gurdin on the early call sheets, Wood when a studio needed something that sounded like a star. An older sister, Olga, and a younger one, Svetlana — Lana Wood — shared the house. The first pressure was a mother who had decided the child would work. Irving Pichel put her in Happy Land in 1943. Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), opposite Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert, showed a gravity that was not a trick of lighting. She was seven, then eight. The job had already begun.
The door the country still keeps is 1947. In Miracle on 34th Street she is Susan Walker, the child who will not be sold a myth until the myth produces a house. Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle has to earn her. The picture became a Christmas object. She became the rare child the cameras did not have to forgive. Warner Bros. and the town kept her employed through the years when most child careers expire in an awkward chin. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the same year, used the face again. Westerns and family pictures kept using it. The danger, in that kind of childhood, is that the public never lets the girl become a woman. She became one anyway.
In 1955 Nicholas Ray cast her as Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, opposite James Dean and Sal Mineo. She was seventeen. The part is a girl who wants a family more than a fight and finds both. It earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The child star was over. In 1956 John Ford used her as Debbie Edwards in The Searchers, the kidnapped niece John Wayne’s Ethan spends years hunting — a role that asked her to be a consequence, not a mascot. Monument Valley is the landscape. The return is the wound. Marjorie Morningstar (1958), from Herman Wouk, kept her in the young-woman business opposite Gene Kelly. Kings Go Forth (1958) put her with Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis. Then 1961 gave her the two pictures the file still leads with.
The child years still need the specific work named. Irving Pichel put her in Happy Land in 1943. Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), opposite Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert, showed a gravity that was not a trick of lighting. Miracle on 34th Street (1947) is Susan Walker on Santa’s lap, refusing to pretend until the myth produces a house — Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle, Maureen O’Hara’s mother, a Christmas object the country still plays. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the same year, used the face again. Warner Bros. kept her employed through westerns and family pictures in the years when most child careers expire in an awkward chin. The danger, in that kind of childhood, is that the public never lets the girl become a woman. She became one anyway, and the town had to nominate the crossing three times without crowning it. Judy in a red jacket. Deanie in Kansas. Maria in a white dress. Debbie in Monument Valley. Those are the pictures. The boat is a paragraph. It is not the career.
Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, opposite Warren Beatty in his first important film, is Wilma Dean Loomis, a Kansas girl punished for wanting. The performance brought a Best Actress nomination. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story made her Maria. The camera loves the face in the dance. The singing, on the soundtrack the world learned, was largely Marni Nixon’s. Wood recorded; the production replaced most of it. That fact belongs in the file, not in a demolition. The picture is still her picture in the public mind. In 1962 she took the title role in Gypsy, opposite Rosalind Russell’s Rose, and played Louise’s climb into Gypsy Rose Lee as work, not as a wink. Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), with Steve McQueen, brought a third Oscar nomination. She had done what almost no American child star of her generation did. She had become a leading actress the town had to take seriously.
She married Robert Wagner on December 28, 1957, while the crossing was still new. They divorced in 1962. The columns made a soap of the split and of the second wedding, in 1972, after Richard Gregson and a daughter, Natasha. Courtney arrived in 1974. The household was a life. The stage mother, Maria, had treated a daughter as a career; the adult woman wanted a kitchen that was not a set. Olga and Lana shared the first house. Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko is the birth name. Gurdin on the early call sheets. Wood when Warner needed a name that sounded like the work. San Francisco, July 20, 1938. A Russian immigrant kitchen. The water off Catalina is not allowed to eat those facts. Three nominations, none a win: Rebel, Splendor in the Grass, Love with the Proper Stranger. The town nominated the crossing. It did not crown it. The face in the gym is still hers even when the voice on the track is Nixon’s.
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers Maria, or the boat. The turn is the crossing itself: from Susan Walker to Judy to Deanie to a woman who could hold a Kazan close-up and a McQueen two-shot without asking the audience to remember the child. A lot of studio girls are kept in the dress that first sold. She changed dresses until the work required it. Sex and the Single Girl (1964) and Blake Edwards’s The Great Race (1965) used the luminosity as comedy. Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and This Property Is Condemned (1966), with Robert Redford, are the strain of that ambition — a studio girl playing the cost of being one. Penelope (1966) was a misfire she did not pretend otherwise. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), for Paul Mazursky, put her in a comedy about marriage at the end of the decade and proved she could be modern without discarding the old light. The 1970s were not a fade so much as a renegotiation. Peeper (1975) with Michael Caine. Meteor (1979). The Last Married Couple in America (1980), again with George Segal, a sex-comedy about a marriage that was trying to stay one. Television paid the bills and, once, the statue: a Golden Globe for the 1979 From Here to Eternity miniseries, as Karen Holmes. Brainstorm, with Christopher Walken, was the return to a feature that asked her to be current. It was unfinished when she died.
Warner Bros. had her under contract when a contract still meant a life. The lot taught marks. The mother taught ambition. The adult woman taught herself a kitchen. West Side Story is the civic object. Splendor in the Grass is the close-up that hurts. Rebel is the red jacket. Miracle on 34th Street is the Christmas tape. Brainstorm is the last unfinished job. Catalina is the water. Natasha and Courtney are the daughters. Lana is the sister who has had to be a sister in public. Those names outrank a headline.
Six things most people never knew
- The birth name is Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. San Francisco, July 20, 1938. Russian parents. Gurdin on the first call sheets. Wood when the studio needed a name that sounded like the work.
- Lana Wood is the younger sister, not a footnote invented after the fact. Olga is the older. The stage mother is the weather all three girls breathed.
- Three Academy Award nominations, none a win. Rebel, Splendor in the Grass, Love with the Proper Stranger. The town nominated the crossing. It did not crown it.
- Maria’s singing on the record the world owns is largely Marni Nixon. Wood sang. The production kept Nixon. The face in the gym is still hers.
- She married Robert Wagner twice. 1957, then 1972, after Richard Gregson and a daughter, Natasha. Courtney is the daughter of the second Wagner marriage. The columns made a soap. The household was a life.
- She had been afraid of dark water since childhood. The fact sits in memoirs and interviews. It does not solve a night. It belongs beside the pictures, not on top of them.
She married Robert Wagner on December 28, 1957. They divorced in 1962. In 1969 she married the British producer Richard Gregson. Their daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, was born in 1970. That marriage ended in 1972. She and Wagner married again that July. Their daughter, Courtney Wagner, was born in 1974. Friends from the Warner lot describe a professional who knew her marks and a woman who wanted a kitchen that was not a set. Natasha and Courtney have had to share a mother who is also a Christmas tape, a Kazan close-up, and a case file. Both the household and the pictures are the life.
The later years
Home, in the second Wagner marriage, was a California household with two daughters and a calendar that mixed television movies with the attempt to keep a kitchen that was not a set. Natasha, from the Gregson years, and Courtney, born in 1974, were the private life the columns kept trying to turn into a soap. She had stepped back from features for stretches of the 1970s to raise them. She came back when the part was a part. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on television in 1976, as Maggie. The Cracker Factory (1979), a mental-hospital picture that asked more of her than a gown. The Golden Globe for From Here to Eternity was the town writing down that the child from Miracle on 34th Street could still hold a week of television. Brainstorm, shooting in 1981 for Douglas Trumbull, was the science-fiction picture that was supposed to be current work. Walken was the co-star. Wagner was the husband on the boat.
On the night of November 28–29, 1981, she was aboard the yacht Splendour off Santa Catalina Island. She drowned. She was forty-three. She had been afraid of dark water since childhood; the fact sits in memoirs and interviews and does not solve a night. The Los Angeles County coroner first ruled the death an accident. In 2012 the certificate was amended to “drowning and other undetermined factors,” and the circumstances of how she entered the water were described as not clearly established. In 2018 the sheriff’s department named Wagner a person of interest. No charge has closed the argument. This page does not retry it. The pictures remain the life. The water is a paragraph the culture has tried, for decades, to turn into the whole book.
Brainstorm was finished without her and released in 1983. The last work is a film about a machine that records experience, which the culture has not been able to leave alone as a metaphor. San Francisco is the first room. The Warner lot was the parish. Catalina is the last water. Susan, Judy, Deanie, and Maria are the climate. The two daughters are the file that outlives the columns.
After she was gone
Natasha and Courtney remain. Lana remains, and has had to be a sister in public. Miracle on 34th Street still plays in December. Rebel Without a Cause still teaches a certain kind of teenager how to stand. West Side Story still puts Maria in a white dress whether the voice on the track is hers or Nixon’s. Splendor in the Grass still hurts. Wagner lived a long public life beside the unanswered night. The case file is a room some readers will always enter. It is not the career.
She came out of a Russian kitchen in San Francisco, worked before she could choose the work, made a Christmas skeptic the country kept, stood next to Dean, played Ford’s kidnapped niece, held Kazan’s close-up, wore Maria’s dress, took three nominations, married twice the man the columns preferred, raised two daughters, and died in water off Catalina at forty-three. If you only remember the boat, you have the headline. If you remember Susan, Judy, Deanie, and a woman who crossed when child stars are supposed to vanish, you have her.
Portrait: Allan Warren · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons