Natalie Wood was four years old when she first appeared in a Hollywood film.
She played a young girl who drops her ice cream cone and looks suitably sad about it in the 1943 drama “Happy Land.” Her nonspeaking role was uncredited; she was on screen for about 15 seconds.
She was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko in San Francisco on July 20, 1938, to Russian immigrant parents. The family bought a house in Santa Rosa in 1942, and the young girl caught the attention of the “Happy Land” film crew working nearby the following year.
Her first major role came as an 8-year-old in the 1947 holiday classic “Miracle on 34th Street.” She would go on to earn three Academy Award nominations before turning 25, for “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Splendor in the Grass” and “Love With the Proper Stranger.” She also famously portrayed Maria in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical “West Side Story.”
She married actor Robert Wagner for the first time in 1957. They divorced in 1962. Each married and divorced other spouses, before reconciling and remarrying each other on a boat in Paradise Cove in Malibu in 1972.
Wood slowed her career during the 1970s while raising a family, appearing in just a few films. She made several television appearances, winning a best-actress Golden Globe award for her work in the 1979 TV miniseries version of “From Here to Eternity.”
She had just finished location shooting for the sci-fi thriller “Brainstorm,” her final film, in late 1981 when she and husband Wagner, her co-star Christopher Walken, and boat captain Dennis Davern took a Thanksgiving weekend cruise to Catalina Island.
After a family dinner on Thanksgiving Day in her Beverly Hills home, Wood and Wagner invited friends to come with them on the trip to Catalina Island, a favorite weekend boating destination of theirs, but most demurred due to stormy weather conditions.
Walken was the only one who decided to go along. They spent Friday night in Avalon…
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