Natalie Wood — The Child Who Became the Actress

Biography

From Miracle's Child to Deanie's Field

Born Natasha Nikolaevna Zacharenko on July 20, 1938, in Santa Ana, California — the daughter of Russian immigrant parents, her father a set builder and her mother an ambitious woman who recognised the child's quality and brought her to a film location at four and a screen test at five. She was working professionally by six and had her breakthrough role at eight in George Seaton's Miracle on 34th Street (1947), playing the child who learns to believe in Santa Claus and whose belief the film uses to make its argument about faith and reason.

The transition from child actress to adult performer is the most difficult manoeuvre in Hollywood, and almost no one accomplishes it without either a hiatus or a visible struggle. Wood accomplished it without either. Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) — Wood as Judy, the teenager whose relationship with James Dean's Jim Stark is the film's moral and emotional argument — introduced her adult career at sixteen. By twenty-one she had earned her first Oscar nomination for Marjorie Morningstar.

Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961) — Wood as Deanie Loomis, the Kansas girl whose thwarted love for Warren Beatty's Bud Stamper leads to a mental breakdown — is the performance at the centre of her legacy: the emotional transparency of a young woman whose desire is too large for her world, played with a fullness that earned her second Oscar nomination and established her in the first rank of American actresses. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story (1961), the same year, gave her Maria, and the decade's most commercially successful musical.

She drowned in the waters off Catalina Island on November 29, 1981, under circumstances that have remained contested. She was forty-three. She had been working, was engaged in a career that had never stopped, and had more range remaining than the films had yet used.

1938

Born Natasha Zacharenko in Santa Ana; Russian immigrant parents; screen test at five

1947

Miracle on 34th Street — the faith and reason child; age eight; the transition begins

1955

Rebel Without a Cause — Judy; Dean; Ray; the adult career launched at sixteen

1961

Splendor in the Grass — Deanie; Oscar nom; Kazan; Beatty; the peak

1961

West Side Story — Maria; the same year; Oscar nom for film; her decade

1963

Love with the Proper Stranger — third Oscar nomination at twenty-five

1981

Drowns off Catalina Island; age forty-three; still working; still more to give

Filmography

From Miracle's Child to Maria's Balcony

1961Drama · Elia Kazan · Warren Beatty

Splendor in the Grass

Kazan's William Inge adaptation — Wood as Deanie Loomis, the Kansas girl whose love for Bud Stamper is thwarted by family pressure and social convention until the thwarting destroys her and then, gradually, reconstitutes something smaller and more durable. The second Oscar nomination; the emotional breakdown scene in the bathtub; the performance that placed her in the first rank of American actresses at twenty-two.

Oscar Nom

The bathtub scene — Deanie's breakdown, the desire and the grief simultaneous, the body unable to contain what the social world has required her to suppress — is played by Wood with a physical commitment and emotional transparency that has no equivalent in her contemporaries. Kazan said it was the most complete performance he had directed; Beatty, who was making his own film debut, has credited her with teaching him what screen acting required.

1961Musical · Robert Wise · Jerome Robbins · Bernstein

West Side Story

Wise and Robbins's Shakespeare adaptation — Wood as Maria, the Puerto Rican girl whose love for Tony across gang lines is the film's Romeo and Juliet argument. The film won ten Academy Awards including Best Picture. Wood's Maria is the emotional centre of a film primarily distinguished by its choreography, and the quality she brings to it — the openness, the longing — earns its place in an overwhelmingly cinematic production.

The balcony scene — Maria and Tony in the fire escape, the city their world and the gangs its constraint — is one of the decade's most complete images of desire as both personal and political, the love story as the argument against the tribalism that will destroy it. Wood's Maria is the film's conscience; her quality — the openness that makes the tragedy credible — is what prevents West Side Story from being merely a spectacular production number with a sad ending.

1947Christmas Drama · George Seaton · Edmund Gwenn

Miracle on 34th Street

George Seaton's holiday film — Wood as Susan Walker, the eight-year-old who has been raised by her rational mother not to believe in Santa Claus and who must decide whether to believe in Kris Kringle. The film that made her a child star, and the performance that established the quality — the face that thinks, the emotional intelligence fully present — that would carry into the adult career.

Susan's quality — the child whose intelligence is apparent but whose capacity for wonder has been educated out of her — is played by the eight-year-old Wood with the same transparency the adult performances would have. The film's argument about faith and evidence runs through Susan's face; we see the reasoning happening, the resistance giving way, the wonder arriving; and the fact that it is happening in a child's face is both what makes the argument legible and what demonstrates the specific quality Wood had from the beginning.

1963Drama · Robert Mulligan · Steve McQueen

Love with the Proper Stranger

Robert Mulligan's New York drama — Wood as Angie Rossini, the Italian-American shop girl who has a one-night stand with a musician (Steve McQueen) and must navigate the consequences in 1963 New York without the option of legal abortion. Third Oscar nomination at twenty-five; the most socially engaged film of her career; and the demonstration that what Kazan had found in Splendor translated to contemporary urban realism.

Oscar Nom

Angie's quality — the working woman navigating a city that offers her very few choices and whose dignity within those constraints is the film's entire moral argument — is played by Wood with a specificity and a warmth that prevents the film's social critique from becoming didactic. Her chemistry with McQueen — two very different instruments finding a common frequency — is the film's commercial engine; her performance is its moral weight.

Honors

Three Nominations — At Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, and Twenty-Five

Oscar Nom — Best Actress

1962

Splendor in the Grass

Second nomination at twenty-two — the breakthrough performance, the bathtub scene, the emotional transparency that Kazan built the film around. The nomination confirmed what Rebel Without a Cause had suggested: the transition from child actress had produced an adult performer of the first rank. Sophia Loren won for Two Women; the comparison is not diminishing to either.

Oscar Nominated

Oscar Nom — Best Actress

1964

Love with the Proper Stranger

Third nomination at twenty-five — for Angie Rossini in Love with the Proper Stranger, the Italian-American shop girl navigating 1963 New York. Three nominations before twenty-six; no career plateau thereafter but a sustained professional engagement that continued until her death. Patricia Neal won for Hud; the concentration of Wood's best work in a single four-year period is remarkable.

Oscar Nominated

The Child-to-Adult Transition

1947 – 1961

The Rarest Achievement

From Miracle on 34th Street at eight to three Oscar nominations between twenty-one and twenty-five — the transition that almost no child actor manages. She accomplished it without a hiatus, without a visible struggle, without losing the quality the child had and the adult needed. The transition is the rarest professional achievement in Hollywood history.

Child to Adult — Seamlessly

Catalina Island

November 29, 1981

The Unfinished Career

She drowned off Catalina Island at forty-three, under circumstances that have remained contested and were formally reopened as a investigation in 2011. She was in the middle of production on Brainstorm. Three Oscar nominations; a career spanning thirty-seven years from her first credit; and the specific loss of more range than the films had yet used.

Catalina Island, 1981

Identity

The Child Made Adult — Deanie's Bathtub — Maria's Balcony

The Transition

The child-to-adult transition — accomplished without hiatus, without visible struggle, without losing the quality. Miracle on 34th Street at eight; Rebel Without a Cause at sixteen; Splendor in the Grass at twenty-two. The continuity is the achievement; the same transparency, the same thinking face, the same emotional openness, scaled to different requirements.

The Kazan Performance

Splendor in the Grass is the performance around which her legacy organises — the bathtub scene, the desire and grief simultaneous, the body unable to contain what the social world has required her to suppress. Kazan said it was the most complete performance he had directed. The nomination confirmed it; the film has outlasted every critical qualification applied to it.

The Dark Water

She was afraid of dark water from childhood — a fear her mother had communicated through a fortuneteller's prediction. The irony that she drowned off Catalina Island is the kind that cannot be processed cleanly. She had lived with the fear for forty years; it proved accurate; the accuracy does not constitute meaning but it constitutes an unbearable fact.

Three Nominations, Twenty-Five

Three Oscar nominations between twenty-one and twenty-five — a concentration of recognition in a four-year period that no actress of her generation matched. The nominations were for three entirely different registers: the emotional breakdown of Deanie, the romantic idealism of Maria, the working-class realism of Angie. The range confirmed across a single decade's beginning.

Legacy

Deanie's Bathtub — Maria's Fire Escape — The Child Grown

Natalie Wood's legacy is the transition — the child who became an adult performer of the first rank without losing the quality that made the child worth watching, and who earned three Oscar nominations between twenty-one and twenty-five for three entirely different registers of the same instrument. Splendor in the Grass, West Side Story, Love with the Proper Stranger — three films in four years that together constitute one of the most concentrated demonstrations of range in a single career's early peak.

She drowned at forty-three with more remaining. The bathtub scene in Splendor in the Grass is the measure of what she was capable of — the emotional transparency fully deployed, the desire and grief simultaneous, the body as the site of everything the social world had refused to accommodate — and the three nominations are the industry's acknowledgment that it saw what the camera had found.

Oscar Nominations

All before age twenty-six

Age at Film Debut

First credit, 1943

Years of Career

1943 to 1981