Trivia

Pallbearers at her funeral were Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier, Elia Kazan, Gregory Peck, David Niven and Fred Astaire.

She was cast as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976) quite unexpectedly, without campaigning for the role. Wood explained that when Laurence Olivier would come to Hollywood, she would often be seated with him at the table at formal sit-down dinners. When Olivier decided to make a version of the Tennessee Williams play, he thought of casting Wood, his dinner companion, and her husband, Robert Wagner, in the husband-wife roles of Brick and Maggie. Naturally, they accepted.

Don Henley wrote the song "Dirty Laundry" to express his outrage at the tabloid press for their treatment of her after her death.

Spoke Russian and English.

She suffered from a deep fear of drowning after having barely survived an accident when she was a little girl, during the filming of The Green Promise (1949). Her fear was so great that Elia Kazan had to lie - promising a double - and trick her into doing the scenes at the water reservoir in Splendour in the Grass (1961).

Had to get her stomach pumped at the hospital following sleeping pill overdoses in June 1961, November 1964 and January 1966. After the third suicide attempt, Wood abandoned her promising career to focus on her mental health and emotional well-being. She was 28 and would appear in just four more films before her death at 43.

The coroner who examined Natalie Wood's corpse was Thomas Noguchi. In 2020, a former volunteer intern at the L.A. Coroner's Office, Michael Franco, accused Noguchi of a cover-up. According Dr. Franco, the substantial bruising on Wood's body was consistent with "someone who gets thrown out of a boat". Yet, Noguchi had refused to include this conclusion in his report.

Was Maureen O'Hara's daughter in two movies, one being the classic Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Natalie referred to Maureen as Mama Maureen until her death on November 29, 1981.

An accident on a movie set (she fell into a river and almost drowned) when she was 9 years old left her with a permanently weakened left wrist and a slight bone protrusion, which, for the rest of her life, she hid with large bracelets. Regardless of the movie role, or anytime that she was out in public, she always wore a large bracelet on the left wrist.

Daughter with Robert Wagner: Courtney Wagner (born March 9, 1974).

Attended ballet classes as a child with Jill St. John and Stefanie Powers. All three women would go on to have long-term associations with Robert Wagner.

She has appeared in four films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Searchers (1956) and West Side Story (1961).

Admired and wanted to emulate Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor. Leigh was her favorite actress.

Wood's death certificate was modified to show some of the uncertainties surrounding the actress' death. The document was amended in August 2012 and changed from accidental drowning to "drowning and other undetermined factors", according to a copy of the certificate obtained August 21, 2012 by The Associated Press.

The Harvard Lampoon often singled her out for derision. On Saturday, April 23, 1966, she surprised the Lampoon's staff when she became the first performer they voted the year's worst to show up and accept her citation.

Her favorite actress was Vivien Leigh and her favorite singer was Bob Dylan.

Splendour, the name of the yacht Wood was on the night she died, was named after her movie Splendour in the Grass (1961).

Started smoking at age 16. Gypsy (1962) co-star Morgan Brittany said of Wood: "I never saw her without a cigarette, ever." She quit smoking when she turned 40.

When Natalie died in 1981, there was almost no explanation given to the public and alarmingly subdued media coverage. It's the tabloids that have kept the case in the news all these years.

She was posthumously awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on February 1, 1986.

Her and co-star Richard Beymer's singing voices were both dubbed in West Side Story (1961). The woman who dubbed Natalie, Marni Nixon, also dubbed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964) and Deborah Kerr in The King and I (1956). It was later reported that Wood was disappointed that her singing voice was not used in the movie.

Burned all of Warren Beatty's clothes when she found out he'd been sleeping around.

Told a reporter from Ladies Home Journal in 1978 that she regularly took the barbiturate Seconal to go to sleep at night. According to biographer Suzanne Finstad, sleeping pills had been part of Wood's bedtime routine since she was 15. Wood was taking at least eight prescription drugs, including the painkiller Darvon, at the time of her death.

Younger sister Lana Wood made a ABC-TV special on Natalie's life, The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2004).

Following her untimely death, she was interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. On her grave, marked Natalie Wood Wagner: Beloved daughter, sister, wife, mother & friend "more than love".

Once interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger, before his career took off, for the magazine "Hollywood Reporter" in 1979. The article was entitled "The Body Meets the Face". Coincidentally and ironically, the final on-camera interview Natalie gave, on the set of Brainstorm (1983) on October 14, 1981, was conducted by Arnold's future wife Maria Shriver.

Her paternal grandparents were Stephan Zacharenko and Eudoxie Sauchenko (AKA Joyce Zavarin), and her maternal grandparents were Stepan Ilich Zoudilov and Maria Andreevna Kuleva. She was of Russian and Ukrainian ancestry. Her father was a janitor and prop builder, though he retired while still in his forties, and her mother claimed to have been a ballerina.

Bowed out of The Mirror Crack'd (1980) due to creative differences. (At 41, she wasn't ready to be seen as "aging" when other actresses her age were still getting sexy parts, though she looked much older than she was at the time.) Elizabeth Taylor took over the role.

Houston lawyer Suzanne Finstad conducted more than 400 interviews for the myth-shattering book "Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood" (2001) and had the cooperation of her sister Lana Wood, who narrates the audio version. It's controversial and makes explosive claims regarding Natalie's early sex life, complex dynamic with Robert Wagner, level of substance abuse and the circumstances surrounding her mysterious death.

By the early 1960s, Natalie Wood was considered one of Hollywood's most valuable and wanted actresses. Her career started to lose steam after a row of box office failures in the mid-1960s, but she was still getting big movie offers. Rather than accepting roles that could kick her career back into high gear (Barefoot in the Park (1967), Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)), she stopped working, and by the mid-1970s was no longer a hot property. She appeared in just 4 feature films during the last 15 years of her life, not counting her would-be comeback picture Brainstorm (1983), which was incomplete at the time of her death. It was ultimately finished and released, but Wood's character had to be written out of three scenes while a stand-in and changing camera angles were used for crucial shots.

Was given a chance to play Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1974), but only under the condition that she screen test for the role since she hadn't made a movie in five years (and before that, nothing for three years). She refused to do the screen test and did not get the role.

She was known for getting all her lines right on the first take and she was nicknamed 'One Take Natalie' as a result.

Reportedly turned down the role of Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) because she didn't want to be separated from her psychoanalyst while the film was on location in the Midwest.

Wood knew screenwriter Gavin Lambert as both were intimates of director Randy Suhr. In the early 1960s, he wrote a novel about an adolescent Hollywood starlet in the 1930s titled Inside Daisy Clover (1965). After reading the book, Wood telephoned Lambert and said, "I'd kill for that part". He assured her she was his first choice for the movie, for which he was writing the screenplay. She got the role and Ruth Gordon got her first Oscar nomination as an actress for portraying Daisy's mother.

Met Robert Redford while attending Van Nuys High School. Redford was later her co-star in Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and This Property Is Condemned (1966) and served as best man at her 1969 wedding to Richard Gregson. They eventually lost touch and Redford was a no show at Natalie's funeral.

She was cast as the Russian astrophysicist Dr. Tatiana Donskaya in Meteor (1979) because she spoke fluent Russian.

"Natalie's Song" by David Pack, was written about Natalie Wood.

Called "The Most Beautiful Teenager in the World" by Life magazine in 1955.

Turned down the role of Judith Anderson in The Devil's Disciple (1959) because she didn't want to work with Kirk Douglas for "personal" reasons.

According to captain Dennis Davern, he and Robert Wagner were aware that Natallie Wood had gone missing. Wagner had reportedly prevented Davern from turning on the search lights and notifying authorities after Wood's disappearance.

In 1982, Wood was supposed to make a comeback following a decade and a half of semiretirement. On February 12, she was scheduled to make her stage debut playing the title role in "Anastasia" at the Ahmanson Theatre in L.A. Brainstorm (1983) was slated for release in July, and Timothy Hutton reported that he and Wood had purchased film rights to the Barbara Wersba book "Country of the Heart" and were planning to team in the drama about the professional/romantic relationship of a young writer and a successful novelist who's dying of cancer.

In the 2010s investigation of Natalie Wood's death, Christopher Walken cooperated with the authorities. He was one of the last persons to see her alive, but he was not considered a suspect by authorities.

Godmother of her daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner was Ruth Gordon, who played Natalie's mother in the film Inside Daisy Clover (1965).

Columbia Pictures secured the film rights for the Henry De Vere Stacpoole novel "The Blue Lagoon" in the mid-1950s, with Natalie in the role of Emmeline Lestrange. However, the project was shelved for many years and was not filmed until the late 1970s and the film The Blue Lagoon (1980) ultimately starred Brooke Shields. Columbia bought this for the American remake of The Blue Lagoon (1949) starring Jean Simmons. The first edition of the movie was made by an English company in 1923, just after the book was written.

Her death was listed at number 24 on E! Television's 101 Most Shocking Moments in Entertainment.

One of the major reasons that Wood's death was considered suspicious by the police, were the recent bruises found on her corpse. Forensic pathologist Michael Hunter speculated that Wood was particularly susceptible to bruising, because she had taken the drug Synthroid (levothyroxine).

Was commonly listed as 5' 3" wearing heels in movie magazines, though her actual height was 5' 2".

Though some people cite her mother as being French, her mother is Russian. The source of this misconception comes from the studio that Natalie worked at when she was a child -- people noticed her mother's accent and when asked if she was French, Maria replied: "Oh yes", a white lie that would contribute to this confusion.

People magazine (USA) named her one of "The 25 Most Intriguing People of 1976" for the January 3, 1977 issue.

Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced that Robert Wagner has been named a "Person of Interest" in the death of Natalie Wood. (February 1, 2018)