Suzanne Finstad’s remarkably researched and occasionally shocking new book is the first full biography of the star known for films such as Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story and Love With the Proper Stranger. Thus began the final phase of a life that ended 19 years later with her mysterious drowning.

She had been nominated for an Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass, and her high-profile marriage to actor Robert Wagner was the stuff of magazine covers.īut beneath the star persona of “Natalie Wood,” created by her relentlessly ambitious and domineering mother, was an insecure and frustrated 24-year-old woman seeking to recapture her real identity - Natasha Gurdin. In 1962, Natalie Wood was the second-highest-paid actress in the world (behind Elizabeth Taylor) and was the embodiment of glamour. Suzanne Finstad has spent 3 years researching this, the first substantive biography of Natalie Wood, conducting over 400 interviews with friends, family, lovers, co-stars and the police officials who investigated her death.Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood.

Her fear of being alone and the years of exploitation and abuse led to an addiction to sleeping pills and several suicide attempts and for the first time, this book looks at evidence, yet to be published, surrounding her premature and controversial death - drowning at the age of 43. Her leading men frequently became her lovers including Elvis Presley, James Dean, Warren Beatty and the real love of her life, Robert Wagner whom she eventually married twice. At fifteen she had embarked on an affair with a director 30 years her senior, she was brutally raped by a leading Hollywood star when she was sixteen -an attack which her mother forbade her to report. Pushed by her domineering, frustrated mother - an alcoholic determined to make her child a star at whatever cost, Natalie grew up fast - lonely and a misfit, uncertain of her identity.

The story of her life is tinged with tragedy and drama. Her dark hypnotic beauty and passionate performances made her a movie star legend, appearing in over fifty films including West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause for which she was Oscar nominated. Born Natasha Zakharenko, Natalie Wood continues to haunt us 20 years after her tragic and mysterious death.

Natasha by Suzanne Finstad