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Though she could never match them in intensity, range or visibility, Natalie Wood desperately wanted to be classed with Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor. Her dream would not come true.

Natalie Wood, despite many career slumps and peaks, was in the public eye for an incredible 38 years, through some of the most explosive decades in American life. Periodically during that time, it was rumored that she was over the hill but she never believed it, acted accordingly, invested in real estate and film properties, and sat out the dry spells. Shrewdly, Wood made sure in press releases and the few widely spaced interviews she gave that only the artistic reference points of her career were remembered. Never winning the one prize she wanted, the Oscar, she always was assured that her three nominations were mentioned, in even minor publicity releases.

Though she could never match them in intensity, range or image visibility, Natalie Wood desperately wanted to be classed with Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor by her colleagues. (Oddly enough, the three actresses were double Oscar winners.) Vivien Leigh was her favorite actress and Wood studied her acting ad infinitum in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. She played Taylor’s big part, Maggie, in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, for television in 1976 with little success. Her high ambitions were sad because her acting was without inner tension, often mechanical and never larger than life.

Instead, Wood was revered by the public because she was beautiful, obviously sincere in her striving for excellence and believable as a person. Two months before her death, she surprised everyone at Governor James Hunt’s press conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, which announced commencement of production of Brainstorm, by garnering all the television and newspaper people away from her co-stars, Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson. She didn’t even try. She just looked like a movie star, while the others seemed more like repertory actors. Her makeup and grooming were perfect while the others looked casual. The tutelege of the great stars, whose child she played during the 1940’s and 50’s, was never forgotten by her. Like Norma Desmond, she realized the public usually responds immediately to a face and style.

Natalie Wood entered the profession at the right time, in 1943, during the wartime boom in films when the potential to be discovered was excellent. In a sense, the movies came to her. Shortly after her Franco-Russian immigrant parents, Nicholas and Maria Gurdin, moved the family from San Francisco to Santa Rosa, California, 20th Century Fox shot location scenes for their wartime tear-jerker, HAPPY LAND (1943), in Santa Rosa. Maria Gurdin, a former ballerina and now a master carpenter’s wife, and Natasha, born on July 20, 1938 in San Francisco, were hired as extras on the production. Even at that age, (along with Carroll Baker and Jayne Mansfield) and “Life” in its January 28, 1957 issue gave her a showcase. Picturing Wood as a dedicated actress who ran old films at the studio to improve herself, it showed her roaming Los Angeles with her pals, Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams, studying derelicts, acting out impromptu scenes in public places and making soapbox speeches (Wood made hers on the right of 18-year-olds to vote). In their “Movie Worst” list, the Harvard Lampoon, in 1958, singled her out as “Mrs. Natalie Wood Wagner, whose saccharine, whining caricatures of American girlhood have, in film after tedious film, raised her above the obstacles of talented competition, first-draft scripts, pubescent co-stars, and sleepy directors to the top of the Hollywood heap.” She was clearly not respected.

Next, Wood campaigned for the coveted role of MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, from the Herman Wouk bestseller of that name. Warner’s eventually cast her after they tried to get Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. Though a moderate success and though it marked Wood’s acceptance as an adult actress, she received only left-handed compliments for her acting. Typical was A. H. Weiler’s review in The New York Times on April 25, 1958: “Natalie Wood… has blossomed into a vivacious, pretty brunette who very likely is as close to a personification of Marjorie as one could wish. But the character is hardly complex, and while Miss Wood is competent in the role, it is rarely a glowing performance.” The Harvard Lampoon named it one of the ten worst of that year.

Frank Sinatra, whose group, “The Clan,” she was friendly with, cast her as the French girl with Negro blood in KINGS GO FORTH (1958) and her value to Warner’s was proved by Sinatra having to pay them $100,000 for her services plus his agreement to star in a Warner film, a commitment worth then around $350,000. Again, she was a pawn between scene-stealing stars, Sinatra and Tony Curtis. The loan-out arrangement infuriated Wood because she was only making $750.00 a week and she went on suspension rather than be loaned out to Universal for THIS EARTH IS MINE. Eighteen months later she won her salary demands and the right to do outside films. Her return film for Warner’s, Cash McCall, though from a popular novel, was an attempt to turn James Garner, a TV star from MAVERICK, into a movie star and Wood, who thought she was an established star, was treated as an ingenue. Needing money, she went on to MGM to star with her husband in perhaps the worst film of her career, ALL THE FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS (1960). The talk around town was that she was finished.

The Wagners were profiled in the June 14, 1959 edition of The New York Times during this period. Both mourned the lack of respect among their colleagues for the designation “movie star.” The teachings of Brando and Dean had come home to roost. The beautiful Wagners who were studio bred (Robert Wagner had been a 20th Century-Fox contract player since 1950) had always expected the studios to reign supreme and were unprepared for the significant films coming from independent production companies. Wood criticized those actors who submerged their personality in a part. What she failed to understand was that actors were now on their own and the studios could no longer mold an image for them. As if it were an omen, their Beverly Hills mansion, which had been totally remodeled, was so carelessly thought out and so top heavy from extra interior columns and decorations that it caved in and spilled into their “his” and “hers” swimming pools.

An unlikely savior, Elia Kazan, a believer in the “Method” school of realistic acting, rescued Wood’s career in spite of herself. He was casting for SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS in 1959, to be released through Warner’s, and wanted to use Natalie Wood because he respected her work in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. He was told she hadn’t made a good movie in years. Kazan demurred and turned to Lee Remick, whom he had discovered and starred in A FACE IN THE CROWD and WILD RIVER. She was pregnant so Kazan returned to Wood. The late Norma Crane, her friend, recalled in the February 26, 1962 issue of Newsweek that Wood went to that fateful interview covered in makeup, mascara, false eyelashes, bracelets and rings. Her usual get-up. In answer to Orane’s suggestion that perhaps she wasn’t being wise, Wood replied that she was Natalie Wood, “and that’s how I go out at night.” Kazan told her to take off her makeup and change her clothes. He convinced her that he would save her career. Kazan stated that, “She worked like she was saving her life,” (Newsweek, October 23, 1961).

As the virginal Kansas 1920’s teenager, Deanie Loomis, who goes mad when she is denied her sweetheart, Bud Stamper, Wood finally won the industry and public respect. Before this was seen, Kazan further consolidated her new position by recommending her to Robert Wise for the lead in WEST SIDE STORY. As Maria in 1961’s big hit she was finally able to put all that dance training to work and she impressed the co-director Jerome Robbins with her expertise and dedication. For years in the shadow of her friend, Elizabeth Taylor, she was now being touted by studio executives and exhibitors as her closest rival. WEST SIDE STORY went on to win the Best Picture Oscar and was the second biggest grossing film of the year. SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS had given her her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress which she’d lost to Sophia Loren for TWO WOMEN (1961).

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