Natalie Wood's daughter premieres a documentary on HBO that vindicates an artist overshadowed by her mysterious death
Among all the stars in Hollywood, there may be only one, the mere mention of whose name automatically brings to mind the circumstances of her death. Nearly 40 years after her pajama-clad body was found floating in the Pacific, what happened aboard the ship where Natalie Wood enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend in 1981 with her husband, Robert Wagner, remains unknown. and actor Christopher Walken. And that mystery has always overshadowed an exceptional career that the actress began at just 4 years old and during which she racked up three Oscar nominations.
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)
Her first major film and her first Oscar nomination. Trying to hold back tears, Wagner recounts his version of what happened: He got into a heated argument with Walken about his wife's career and became so angry that he smashed a wine bottle on the table. ; he went to retire to her room when he verified that she had disappeared. The official story is that he fell overboard while trying to attach a lifeboat tether to the side of the yacht, and 'Backstage' does not dispute that. Be that as it may, neither the film nor the biographical book 'More than Love', which Gregson Wagner has written and which will also be released in the coming days, will manage to mitigate morbidity around Wood that is inexhaustible.
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)
It is said that during the filming she had an affair with Warren Beatty. Wagner denies it.
In February, without going any further, the name of the actress was a trend following the death of Kirk Douglas, since it is rumored that the actor was the person she was referring to when she claimed to have been raped at only 15 years old by someone very powerful Hollywood. And just a few weeks ago she arrived at the bookstore 'Natalie Wood: the complete biography', a reissue of the controversial text that Suzanne Finstad published in 2001 and in which she is convinced that Wagner knows more than she tells.
WEST SIDE STORY (1961)
The tape launched her to stardom. She was dubbed in the singing scenes.
Wood had a father who was alcoholic and prone to physical violence. Determined to make her a child star, her mother subjected her to psychological abuse that caused her to suffer from phobias, paranoia, and panic attacks.
It was also her mother, apparently, who threw her into the arms of Frank Sinatra when she was only 15 years old -he was 38- and a year later pushed her to use drugs with the director Nicholas Ray -42- to earn his role in 'Rebel Without a Cause'. It is tempting to link these childhood and adolescent traumas with the turbulent love life that the actress lived after her, her addictions to pills and alcohol, and her various suicide attempts. The first of them, Finstad says in her book, was in 1961, when she discovered Wagner in the mansion where they lived together, in the middle of a s- act with the butler.
LOVES WITH A STRANGER (1963)
She came out of it with her third Oscar nomination and an idyll with Steve McQueen.
Some gossips claim that during the fatal weekend of 1981, Wood tried to make Wagner pay for that old betrayal by flirting with Walken; others suggest that the flirtation actually occurred between the two men. The captain of the boat, Dennis Tavern, has been insisting for years that Wagner had an epic fight with Wood that night and that when he noticed his absence, not only did he decide not to look for his wife, but it took him two hours to call the authorities. The police have reopened the case several times, but the mystery remains unsolved, and his victim remains doomed to be little more than a corpse wrapped in question marks.
