Love with The Proper Actress: Natalie Wood

By this time, Wood was in her early twenties and had become a picturesque, beautiful woman, one of the most exquisite to ever grace a movie screen. With her large, doe-like eyes and a lovely figure that was frequently displayed in gorgeous dresses that highlighted her extraordinarily petite waist, she was an actress that the camera completely adored.

In LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER (1963), she played one of her first adult roles as Angela Rossini, a New York girl pregnant by an ambitionless jazz musician (Steve McQueen) she met on a one-night stand. Wood is first-rate as Angela, though the role does reveal some limitations about her acting talent. She tries her best to sound ethnic, but her distinctly proper diction keeps getting in the way. Still, the movie changes directions quite a few times - from the slapstick comedy of Tom Bosley's klutzy courtship with Angela, to the harrowing scene where Angela is about to undergo an illegal abortion in an abandoned apartment - and Wood handles the changing emotional tides skillfully.

Wood continued acting for the rest of the decade, though she was wasted as a caricature of pioneering feminist Helen Gurley Brown in the silly sex farce SEX AND THE SINGLE GIRL (1964) and as the suffragette in Blake Edward's slapstick epic THE GREAT RACE (1965). Her next most notable role would also be the last important film she would star in - 1969's BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE (1969). Now in her early thirties, she was at last able to play more mature roles, here as a thirty-something wife who revels in the new sexual morality of the sixties.

She took a sabbatical after BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE, appearing in only a handful of films in the seventies, although she did some fine work on television, including the TV Movie THE CRACKER FACTORY (1979). That year, she seemed to be mounting a career comeback, appearing on television in the mini-series FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and husband Robert Wagner's popular television show HART TO HART, as well as the ridiculous all-star theatrical disaster epic METEOR. She followed with two more theatrical films and one TV movie in 1980. In 1981, she drowned off the coast of Catalina Island at age 43.

BRAINSTORM, a techno-thriller filmed in filmed 1981 but not released until 1983, was her last film. Perhaps it was

Go To Page: 1 2 3

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic