Before the Tragedy: Natalie Wood's Interesting Career

This documentary is "heading towards" a detailed discussion of "what happened" on that fateful night off of Catalina in 1981, but watching the clips that preceded it, one is reminded that Natalie Wood had an interesting career -- became a VERY big star -- and then tapered off and disappeared for awhile before returning to the big screen with some telltale age on her face.


We're shown that she started out as a very good child star , with at least one classic -- Miracle on 34th Street. Like too many child actors, she ended up supporting her entire family and feeling the pressures therefrom.

Which is why, by the time she made the classic "Rebel Without a Cause" as a teenager in 1955, Natalie was evidently vulnerable and "ripe" for an affair with her much older director, Nicholas Ray.

Her career built up steam until the watershed year of 1961 -- with the Best Picture epic West Side Story on the one hand and the Elia Kazan-directed watershed film of youth and sex, Splendor in the Grass, as the other.

She was a major star for the rest of the sixties -- Gypsy in 1962, Love with the Proper Stranger with Steve McQueen in '63, the all-time family pop classic "The Great Race" in 1965(clips remind us that Natalie played a raging feminist in that film -- and was taken seriously), back-to-back films with Young Robert Redford...climaxing in "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" in 1969, with Natalie looking fit and sexy in bikini and lingerie, and taking up the hip topic of counterculture marital swapping and other "hip" themes."

Natalie Wood seemed to have been built to be a big star ONLY in the 60's , alas. She took some years off to be a mother, and came back looking dangerously aged for a sexy star. She split her time between so-so movies and noteable TV productions. She remarried the actor she had divorced when she got "hot"(Robert Wagner) and this time around their stardom was roughy the same wattage -- he had hit TV shows(including Hart to Hart at the time of Wood's death); she was in movies like "Meteor" and "Brainstorm" -- the movie she was making at the time OF her death.

Still, the documentary reminds us that in the 60's, Natalie Wood was a big, major female star who was willing to wear the sexy bikinis on the one hand, but was an Oscar-caliber actress on the other.

I liked this part of the documentary better than I liked the part about her final night on earth...