Focus Features

Natalie Wood at her most playful

Natalie Wood's untimely death in a drowning accident at the age of 43 was a great shock.  There was something almost fated about it since she had been terrified of water since a near-death experience filming The Green Promise where she had to run across a footbridge over a raging torrent. The footbridge was timed to collapse, but broke in half too soon and Natalie managed to cling on to one of the planks and so stopped herself from falling into the torrent below and being swept away to her death.

Gavin Lambert became a friend of Natalie Wood's when she starred in the film version of his novel Inside Daisy Clover.

He summed up her career in this way:

“For the movie actor, talent – or the "something extra" that they have – implies an emotional and physical transaction between the audience and an image on the screen. It's instantaneous, like love at first sight, and in Natalie's case the shot of her in her first movie, Tomorrow is Forever, sealed the transaction.  A tiny seven-year-old walks hand-in-hand along a street with Orson Welles, who overshadows her physically, of course, and yet the eye is drawn to this mysteriously composed child.  You want to know more about her, just as you want to know more about the adolescent at juvenile hall in Rebel Without a Cause, who wears too much make-up and seems as mysteriously tense as the child in Tomorrow is Forever was composed.  In the same way, the adult Natalie immediately catches the eye with a minimum of "acting".  In the opening shots of Love With a ProperStranger, when she hurries into a New York theater crowded with jazz musicians, and looks around in a way that suggests she's a stranger in that world, you wonder what brought her there and why she's so anxiously determined.  And sixteen years later, when the housewife in The Cracker Factory pushes her shopping cart along a supermarket aisle, why does the apparently simple act of hesitating about what to buy suggest that he confusion lies much deeper?

In an unusually reflective moment, Bette Davis gave her own definition of that "something extra", which she herself had in spades. "The real actor," she said, " has a direct line to the collective heart." It explains why, when Natalie Wood died, the collective and personal loss became one.”

Extract from Natalie Wood by Gavin Lambert (Faber & Faber, 2004).

Essential Viewing: Miracle on 34th Street [Buy], Rebel Without a Cause [Buy], Splendor in the Grass [Buy], West Side Story [Buy], Love With a Proper Stranger, Inside Daisy Clover [Buy], Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice [Buy], The Cracker Factory

Natalie Wood at her most playful

Natalie Wood's untimely death in a drowning accident at the age of 43 was a great shock.  There was something almost fated about it since she had been terrified of water since a near-death experience filming The Green Promise where she had to run across a footbridge over a raging torrent. The footbridge was timed to collapse, but broke in half too soon and Natalie managed to cling on to one of the planks and so stopped herself from falling into the torrent below and being swept away to her death.

Gavin Lambert became a friend of Natalie Wood's when she starred in the film version of his novel Inside Daisy Clover.

He summed up her career in this way:

“For the movie actor, talent – or the "something extra" that they have – implies an emotional and physical transaction between the audience and an image on the screen. It's instantaneous, like love at first sight, and in Natalie's case the shot of her in her first movie, Tomorrow is Forever, sealed the transaction.  A tiny seven-year-old walks hand-in-hand along a street with Orson Welles, who overshadows her physically, of course, and yet the eye is drawn to this mysteriously composed child.  You want to know more about her, just as you want to know more about the adolescent at juvenile hall in Rebel Without a Cause, who wears too much make-up and seems as mysteriously tense as the child in Tomorrow is Forever was composed.  In the same way, the adult Natalie immediately catches the eye with a minimum of "acting".  In the opening shots of Love With a ProperStranger, when she hurries into a New York theater crowded with jazz musicians, and looks around in a way that suggests she's a stranger in that world, you wonder what brought her there and why she's so anxiously determined.  And sixteen years later, when the housewife in The Cracker Factory pushes her shopping cart along a supermarket aisle, why does the apparently simple act of hesitating about what to buy suggest that he confusion lies much deeper?

In an unusually reflective moment, Bette Davis gave her own definition of that "something extra", which she herself had in spades. "The real actor," she said, " has a direct line to the collective heart." It explains why, when Natalie Wood died, the collective and personal loss became one.”

Extract from Natalie Wood by Gavin Lambert (Faber & Faber, 2004).

Essential Viewing: Miracle on 34th Street [Buy], Rebel Without a Cause [Buy], Splendor in the Grass [Buy], West Side Story [Buy], Love With a Proper Stranger, Inside Daisy Clover [Buy], Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice [Buy], The Cracker Factory