Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood - Hardcover

Finstad, Suzanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609603590 ISBN 13: 9780609603598

Publisher: Crown Pub, 2001

Synopsis

A definitive portrait of the acclaimed film actress describe Wood's youth as an abused and exploited child star and troubled teen, her years as a top movie star, her romances, her two marriages to Robert Wagner, and her tragic drowning death, drawing on nearly four hundred interviews with friends, family, colleagues, lovers, and others. 75,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Natalie Wood (1938-81) came from the last generation of movie stars shaped by the Hollywood studio system, and in Natasha Suzanne Finstad gives her life the all-out showbiz celebrity bio treatment. As Finstad sees it, Wood was tortured by the conflict between her real self, born Natasha Zakharenko to Russian immigrants, and the glamorous "Natalie Wood" persona created by her ambitious mother. Wood admired rebellious actors like James Dean, her co-star in Rebel Without a Cause, but she wanted the mink coats, sexy cars, and huge salaries Warner Brothers doled out for appearances in forgettable pictures like Sex and the Single Girl. Working in films from age six, she learned early that the way to get ahead was to please the grownups, a lesson she never really unlearned, even in her wild teens. She ditched a fiancé‚ deemed unsuitable by the studio, to marry suave rising star Robert Wagner, despite warnings from friends that he was bisexual; their first marriage ended when she found him "in a compromising position with another man," but they reunited in 1972 to become Hollywood's golden couple once more. But her attraction to more challenging artists remained; her friendship with Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken sparked the drunken quarrel that in Finstad's account led to Wood's drowning off Wagner's boat. (Chillingly, she had a lifelong fear of water.) Numerous quotes from practically everyone who ever knew Wood evoke Tinseltown's gossipy atmosphere, and Finstad's overwrought prose (she describes Wood as "bound to her mother, as if Maria were a snake coiled around her neck") sustains an appropriately high-pitched mood. Suicide attempts, reckless driving, excessive drinking, rape by an unnamed Hollywood star are all chronicled in detail that might be distasteful if the author weren't so sympathetic towards her vulnerable heroine. --Wendy Smith

Review:

"A gripping tale." (Punch)

"Powerfully gripping" (JG Ballard Daily Telegraph)

"A riveting biography" (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Pub
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0609603590
• ISBN 13: 9780609603598
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 454