Natalie Wood

Before he was born, legend says that a gypsy woman approached his mother, a Russian dancer, and predicted that she would have a daughter who would make the whole world fall in love, but beware of dark waters. So it was. This is the story of Natalie Wood.

After settling in the United States, the artist’s father, Nicolai Zacharenko, changed his name to Nicholas Gurdin, which sounded more Anglo-Saxon. Her daughter Natasha Nicolaevna, real name Natalie, was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco (California). Fascinated by Hollywood, María Kuleff, the little girl’s mother, insisted that her daughter be an actress. The first stage of “operation triumph” began when the family lived in Santa Rosa, where director Irving Pichel disembarked to shoot Happy Land . Encouraged by her mother, and sitting on the filmmaker’s knee, the girl sang a song for him. He succumbed to the charm of her little girl, and made her appear briefly on the tape. Two years later he called her for a larger role in Mañana es vivir.

Obfuscated that her little girl became a superstar, the ambitious Mrs. Gurdin did not hesitate to border on child exploitation. First, she subjected her daughter to a relentless series of shoots, and she signed a contract in 1947 with Fox. She also used dirty tricks to make her daughter convincing on the screen. That the little girl had difficulty crying? No problem. The Machiavellian woman caught a butterfly and tore off its wings in front of the girl, who burst into tears. So much desire for success gave rise to unforgettable performances, such as that of that girl who did not believe in Santa Claus in De ilusión se también vive , or the daughter of a widow in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir .

Unlike other rising stars, Natalie had no regrets about her early years on camera. “It’s a cliché that people take pity on me for being a child star,” she once explained. Although child prodigies usually retire from the cinema when they reach their growth spurt, and that Mickey Rooney and Joselito never did, Natalie continued to be photogenic and credible on camera. But in adolescence she rebelled against her despotic mother. The discussion ended in a tie, and Natalie got her mother to allow her to date boys, in exchange for appearing in the series The Pride of the Family .

James Dean , who had worked with her on television, recommended her for Rebel Without a Cause ; then John Ford turned her into a teenager kidnapped by the Indians in Desert Centaurs , and Elia Kazan into a humble young man, who sees how time tests her love in Splendor in the Grass . That same year, 1961, she swept the box office with the musical West Side Story .

It seemed that Natalie Wood had found the man of her life when she married actor Robert Wagner in 1957. And although they divorced, Natalie reconsidered, and as in the movies they got back together in 1972. In the late 60s, Natalie Wood he went on to garner hits like Condemned Property . But the “dark waters” indicated by the gypsy would appear, and the actress was found drowned on Catalina Island, in the Pacific, on November 29, 1981, after a night of alcohol and marital discussions.