In a memoir coming out next week, Wood's younger sister identifies the long-suspected assailant: Kirk Douglas.
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“I remember that Natalie looked especially beautiful when Mom and I dropped her off that night at the Chateau Marmont entrance,” Lana Wood writes in “Little Sister,” alleging that the incident happened in the summer of 1955, around the time Natalie Wood was filming “The Searchers.” The meeting had been arranged by their mother, Maria Zakharenko, who thought that “many doors might be thrown open for her, with just a nod of his famous, handsome head on her behalf,” according to Lana Wood.
“It seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut," she writes. "She looked awful. She was very disheveled and very upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn't really hear them or make out what they were saying. Something bad had apparently happened to my sister, but whatever it was, I was apparently too young to be told about it.”...
Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood was an American actress who began her career in film as a child actor and successfully transitioned to young adult roles. She was the recipient of four Golden Globes, and three Academy Award nominations.
Born in San Francisco to Russian immigrant parents, Wood began her acting career at age 4 and was given a co-starring role at age 8 in Miracle on 34th Street. As a teenager, she earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause, followed by a role in John Ford's The Searchers. Wood starred in the musical films West Side Story and Gypsy, and she received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Splendor in the Grass and Love with the Proper Stranger. Her career continued with films such as Sex and the Single Girl, Inside Daisy Clover, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
During the 1970s, Wood began a hiatus from film and had a daughter with husband Robert Wagner, whom she had previously married and divorced. Wagner and Wood remarried after she divorced her second husband Richard Gregson, with whom she had a daughter, Natasha. She acted in only two feature films throughout the decade, but appeared slightly more often in television productions, including a remake of the film From Here to Eternity for which she received a Golden Globe Award. Wood's films represented a 'coming of age' for her and for Hollywood films in general. Critics have suggested that her cinematic career represents a portrait of modern American womanhood in transition, as she was one of the few to take both child roles and those of middle-aged characters.
Wood drowned off Santa Catalina Island on November 29, 1981, at age 43, during a holiday break from the production of Brainstorm with Christopher Walken. The events surrounding her death have been the subject of conflicting witness statements, prompting the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, under the instruction of the coroner's office, to list her cause of death as 'drowning and other undetermined factors' in 2012. In 2018, Wagner was named as a person of interest in the ongoing investigation into Wood's death.
Early life
Natalie Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko in San Francisco, California, the daughter of Maria Stepanovna Zudilova, an ex-ballerina known by several aliases, and her second husband, janitor Nikolai Stepanovich Zakharenko. Natalia's father was born in Nikolskoye into the poor family of Stepan Zakharenko, a chocolate-factory worker who joined the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces during the Russian Civil War. Her grandfather was killed in 1918 in a street fight in Vladivostok between Red and White Russian soldiers. After that, his wife and her three sons fled to their relatives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Later, they moved to San Francisco, where Nikolai worked as a day laborer and carpenter.
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Natalia's mother, Maria, was born in Barnaul, southern Siberia. Maria's father, Stepan Zudilov, owned soap and candle factories, as well as an estate outside the city. With the start of the civil war, his family left Russia, resettling as refugees in the Chinese city of Harbin. In 1925, Maria married Alexander Tatuloff in China and had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1936. Natalia liked to describe her family as having been either gypsies or landowning aristocrats in Russia. In her youth, her mother had dreamed of becoming an actress or ballet dancer. Natalia and her sisters were raised Russian Orthodox. As an adult, she stated, 'I'm very Russian, you know.' She spoke Russian with an American accent and English.
Biographer Warren Harris wrote that under the family's 'needy circumstances', Wood's mother may have transferred her ambitions to her middle daughter. Her mother would take little Natalia to the cinema as often as she could: 'Natalie's only professional training was watching Hollywood child stars from her mother's lap,' notes Harris. Wood would later recall this time, 'My mother used to tell me that the cameraman who pointed his lens out at the audience at the end of the Paramount newsreel was taking my picture. I'd pose and smile like he was going to make me famous or something. I believed everything my mother told me.'
Shortly after Natalia was born in San Francisco, her family moved to Santa Rosa. Natalia was noticed by members of a crew during a film shoot in downtown Santa Rosa. Her mother soon moved the family to Los Angeles in order to pursue a film career for her daughter. After Natalia started acting as a child, David Lewis and William Goetz, studio executives at RKO Radio Pictures, changed her name to Natalie Wood, in reference to director Sam Wood.
Wood's younger sister, Svetlana Gurdin, was born in Santa Monica after the move. Now known as Lana Wood, she also became an actress.
Peak years of stardom
Wood sang when she starred in the film Gypsy alongside Rosalind Russell. Her appearance in that film led critic Pauline Kael to comment 'clever little Natalie Wood... most machine-tooled of Hollywood ingénues.'
In 1964, at the age of 25, Wood received her third Academy Award nomination for Love with the Proper Stranger, making Wood the youngest person to score three Oscar nominations. This record was later broken by Jennifer Lawrence in 2013 and Saoirse Ronan in 2017, both of whom scored their third nominations at the age of 23.
Wood made two comedies with Tony Curtis: Sex and the Single Girl and The Great Race, the latter with Jack Lemmon, and Peter Falk. In The Great Race, her ability to speak Russian was an asset given to her character Maggie DuBois, justifying the character's recording the progress of the race across Siberia and entering the race at the beginning as a contestant.
Director Sydney Pollack was quoted as saying about Wood, 'When she was right for the part, there was no one better. She was a damn good actress.' For Inside Daisy Clover and This Property Is Condemned, both of which co-starred Robert Redford, Wood received Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. After the release of the films, Wood suffered emotionally and sought professional therapy. She paid Warner Bros. $175,000 to cancel her contract and fired her entire support team: agents, managers, publicist, accountant, and attorneys. In the mid 1960s she was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood along with Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn.
Although many of Wood's films were commercially successful, at times her acting was criticized. In 1966, Wood was given the Harvard Lampoon award for being the 'Worst Actress of Last Year, This Year, and Next'. She was the first performer to attend their ceremony and accept an award in person. The Harvard Crimson wrote she was 'quite a good sport'. Following a disappointing reception to Penelope, Wood took a three-year hiatus from acting. She was announced for I Never Promised You a Rose Garden but did not appear in it.
Later career
Wood reunited on the screen with Robert Wagner in the television film of the week The Affair, and with Laurence Olivier and Wagner in an adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the British series Laurence Olivier Presents broadcast as a special by NBC.
In between these she made Peeper with Michael Caine.
She made cameo appearances on Wagner's prime-time detective series Switch in 1978 as 'Bubble Bath Girl,' and Hart to Hart in 1979 as 'Movie Star'.
After another lengthy break, she appeared in the ensemble disaster film Meteor with Sean Connery and the sex comedy The Last Married Couple in America with George Segal and Valerie Harper. Her performance in the latter was praised and considered reminiscent of her performance in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In Last Married Couple, Wood broke ground: although an actress with a clean, middle-class image, she used the 'F' word in a frank marital discussion with her husband.
Personal life Wood's two marriages to actor Robert Wagner were highly publicized. They first married on December 28, 1957, in Scottsdale, Arizona. On June 20, 1961, the couple announced their separation in a joint press release, and divorced ten months later on April 27, 1962.
Following this starter marriage, Wood dated Warren Beatty, Michael Caine and David Niven Jr.. She also had a broken engagement in 1965 with shoe manufacturer Ladislav Blatnik.
On May 30, 1969, Wood married British producer Richard Gregson after dating for nearly three years. They had a daughter, Natasha. Wood filed for divorce from Gregson on August 4, 1971, and it was finalized on April 12, 1972.
After a short-lived romance with future California governor Jerry Brown, Wood resumed her relationship with Wagner at the end of January 1972. They remarried on July 16 aboard the Ramblin' Rose, anchored off Paradise Cove in Malibu. Their daughter Courtney was born in 1974. Wood's sister Lana Wood said of this period:
Her marriage was considered to be one of the best in Hollywood, and there is no question that she was a devoted, loving—even adoring—mother and stepmother. She and R. J. had begun with love and built from there. They had overcome each other's problems and had reached an accommodation with time and the changes time brings. As with anybody else who has settled into making a long marriage work, they were far more determined than most people to make it work.
In 2013, retired FBI agent Donald Wilson proclaimed that he and Wood had had a four-year affair, from 1973 to 1977, while she was married to Wagner. Wilson has discussed his alleged affair with Wood on social media, in tabloid articles, and in an on-camera interview for the cable network Reelz.
Suzanne Finstad's 2001 biography of Wood alleges that she was raped by a powerful actor when she was 16. Through the recollection of Wood's close friends, which included actors Scott Marlowe and Dennis Hopper, Finstad said:
Though her five close friends' memories of some details or timing differ after forty-five years, the essence of what each recalls Natalie confiding to them is the same: that the same married film star lured or tricked Natalie, raped her so brutally she was physically injured, and she was too frightened or intimidated to report it to the police. Natalie 'hated' her former screen idol afterward, 'shuddering' if she heard his name. She would keep the horrible secret, and behave as if nothing happened whenever their paths intersected, too schooled by Mud in the politics of Hollywood to cross a powerful movie star.
In 2018, Lana Wood said during a 12-part podcast about her sister's life that the attack had occurred inside the Chateau Marmont during an audition and went on 'for hours'. According to professor Cynthia Lucia, who studied the attack, Wood's rape was brutal and violent. In the memoir Little Sister: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood published in 2021, Lana Wood alleged the assailant was Kirk Douglas and said the assault took place in the summer of 1955.
Death
Wood died under mysterious circumstances at age 43 during the making of Brainstorm while on a weekend boat trip to Santa Catalina Island on board her husband’s 58' motoryacht Splendour. Outside of drowning, many of the circumstances are unknown; it was never determined how she entered the water. Wood was with her husband Robert Wagner, Brainstorm co-star Christopher Walken, and Splendour's captain Dennis Davern on the evening of November 28, 1981. Authorities recovered her body at 8 a.m. on November 29, 1 mi away from the boat, with a small Valiant-brand inflatable dinghy beached nearby. Wagner said that she was not with him when he went to bed. The autopsy report revealed that she had bruises on her body and arms, as well as an abrasion on her left cheek, but no indication as to how or when the injuries occurred.
Davern had previously stated that Wood and Wagner argued that evening, which Wagner denied at the time. In his memoir Pieces of My Heart, Wagner admitted that he had an argument with Wood before she disappeared. The autopsy found that Wood's blood alcohol content was 0.14% and that there were traces of a motion-sickness pill and a painkiller in her bloodstream, both of which increase the effects of alcohol. Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled the cause of her death to be accidental drowning and hypothermia. According to Noguchi, Wood had been drinking and she may have slipped while trying to re-board the dinghy. Her sister Lana expressed doubts, alleging that Wood could not swim and had been 'terrified' of water all her life, and that she would never have left the yacht on her own by dinghy. Two witnesses who were on a nearby boat stated that they had heard a woman scream for help during the night.
Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Representatives of international media, photographers, and members of the public tried to attend her funeral, but all were required to remain outside the cemetery walls. Among the celebrities were Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, Elia Kazan, and Laurence Olivier. Olivier flew in from London in order to attend the service.
The case was reopened in November 2011 after Davern publicly stated that he had lied to police during the initial investigation and that Wood and Wagner had an argument that evening. He alleged that Wood had been flirting with Walken, that Wagner was jealous and enraged, and that Wagner had prevented Davern from turning on the search lights and notifying authorities after Wood's disappearance. Davern alleged that Wagner was responsible for her death. Walken hired a lawyer, co-operated with the investigation, and was not considered a suspect by authorities.
In 2012, Los Angeles County Chief Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran amended Wood's death certificate and changed the cause of death from accidental drowning to 'drowning and other undetermined factors'. The amended document included a statement that it is 'not clearly established' how Wood ended up in the water. Detectives instructed the coroner's office not to discuss or comment on the case. On January 14, 2013, the Los Angeles County coroner's office offered a 10-page addendum to Wood's autopsy report. The addendum stated that Wood might have sustained some of the bruises on her body before she went into the water, but that this could not be definitively determined. Forensic pathologist Michael Hunter speculated that Wood was particularly susceptible to bruising because she had taken the drug Synthroid. In 2020, a medical doctor and former intern of Noguchi at the time of Wood's death stated that the bruises were substantial and fitting for someone thrown out of a boat. He claimed that he made those observations to Noguchi.
In February 2018, Wagner was named a person of interest by the police in the investigation; he has denied any involvement. The police stated that they know that Wagner was the last person who was with Wood when she died. In a 2018 report, the Los Angeles Times cited the coroner's report from 2013 saying that Wood had unexplained fresh bruising on her right forearm, left wrist, and right knee, a scratch on her neck and a superficial scrape on her forehead. Officials said that it is possible that she was assaulted before she drowned.
Kirk Douglas
Kirk Douglas was an American actor, director, producer, screenwriter, and philanthropist. After an impoverished childhood, he made his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s, known for serious dramas, including westerns and war films. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 films and was known for his explosive acting style. He was named by the American Film Institute the 17th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood cinema and was also one of the last surviving major-stars of this period.
Douglas became an international star through positive reception for his leading role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion, which brought him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other early films include Out of the Past, Young Man with a Horn, playing opposite Lauren Bacall and Doris Day, Ace in the Hole opposite Jan Sterling, and Detective Story, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actor in a Drama. He received his second Oscar nomination for his dramatic role in The Bad and the Beautiful, opposite Lana Turner, and his third for portraying Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, which also landed him a second Golden Globe nomination.
In September 1949, he established Bryna Productions, which began producing films as varied as Paths of Glory and Spartacus. In those two films, he collaborated with the then-relatively unknown director Stanley Kubrick, taking lead roles in both films. Douglas has been praised for helping to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with an official on-screen credit. He produced and starred in Lonely Are the Brave, considered a classic, and Seven Days in May, opposite Burt Lancaster, with whom he made seven films. In 1963, he starred in the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a story that he purchased and later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film.
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As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas received three Academy Award nominations, an Academy Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As an author, he wrote ten novels and memoirs. He ranked No. 17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema, and was the highest-ranked living person on the list until his death. After barely surviving a helicopter crash in 1991 and then suffering a stroke in 1996, he focused on renewing his spiritual and religious life. He lived with his second wife, producer Anne Buydens, until his death. A centenarian, he was one of the last surviving stars of the film industry’s ‘Golden Age’.
Early life and education
Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York on December 9, 1916, the son of Bryna 'Bertha' and Herschel 'Harr'y Danielovitch. His parents were immigrants from Chavusy, Mogilev Governorate, in the Russian Empire, and the family spoke Yiddish at home. Douglas would embrace his Jewish heritage in his later years, after a near-fatal helicopter crash at the age of 74.
His father's brother, who immigrated earlier, used the surname Demsky, which Douglas's family adopted in the United States.:?2? Douglas grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the United States Navy during World War II.
In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman's Son, Douglas notes the hardships that he, along with his parents and six sisters, endured during their early years in Amsterdam:
My father, who had been a horse trader in Russia, got himself a horse and a small wagon, and became a ragman, buying old rags, pieces of metal, and junk for pennies, nickels, and dimes … Even on Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman's son.
Douglas had an unhappy childhood, living with an alcoholic, physically abusive father. While his father drank up what little money they had, Douglas and his mother and sisters endured 'crippling povert'y.
Douglas first wanted to be an actor after he recited the poem 'The Red Robin of Spring' while in kindergarten and received applause. Growing up, he sold snacks to mill workers to earn enough to buy milk and bread to help his family. He later delivered newspapers, and he had more than forty jobs during his youth before becoming an actor. He found living in a family with six sisters to be stifling: 'I was dying to get out. In a sense, it lit a fire under me.'
After appearing in plays at Amsterdam High School, from which he graduated in 1934, he knew he wanted to become a professional actor. Unable to afford the tuition, Douglas talked his way into the dean's office at St. Lawrence University and showed him a list of his high school honors. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1939. He received a loan which he paid back by working part-time as a gardener and a janitor. He was a standout on the wrestling team and wrestled one summer in a carnival to make money. He later became good friends with world-champion wrestler Lou Thesz.
Douglas's acting talents were noticed at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, which gave him a special scholarship. One of his classmates was Betty Joan Perske, who would play an important role in launching his film career. Bacall wrote that she 'had a wild crush on Kirk', and they dated casually. Another classmate, and a friend of Bacall's, was aspiring actress Diana Dill, who would later become Douglas's first wife.
During their time together, Bacall learned Douglas had no money and that he once spent the night in jail since he had no place to sleep. She once gave him her uncle's old coat to keep warm: 'I thought he must be frozen in the winter … He was thrilled and grateful.' Sometimes, just to see him, she would drag a friend or her mother to the restaurant where he worked as a busboy and waiter. He told her his dream was to someday bring his family to New York to see him on stage. During that period she fantasized about someday sharing her personal and stage lives with Douglas, but would later be disappointed: 'Kirk did not really pursue me. He was friendly and sweet—enjoyed my company—but I was clearly too young for him,' the eight-years-younger Bacall later wrote.
Personality
In The Ragman's Son, Douglas described himself as a 'son of a bitch', adding, 'I’m probably the most disliked actor in Hollywood. And I feel pretty good about it. Because that’s me…. I was born aggressive, and I guess I’ll die aggressive.' Co-workers and associates alike noted similar traits, with Burt Lancaster once remarking, 'Kirk would be the first to tell you that he is a very difficult man. And I would be the second.' Douglas's brash personality is attributed to his difficult upbringing living in poverty and his aggressive alcoholic father who was neglectful of Kirk as a young child. According to Douglas, 'there was an awful lot of rage churning around inside me, rage that I was afraid to reveal because there was so much more of it, and so much stronger, in my father.' Douglas's discipline, wit, and sense of humor were also often recognized.
Marriages and children
Douglas and his first wife, Diana Dill, married on November 2, 1943. They had two sons, actor Michael Douglas and producer Joel Douglas, before divorcing in 1951. Afterwards, in Paris, he met producer Anne Buydens while acting on location in Act of Love. She originally fled from Germany to escape Nazism and survived by putting her multilingual skills to work at a film studio, creating translations for subtitles. They married on May 29, 1954. In 2014, they celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills.
They had two sons, Peter, a producer, and Eric, an actor who died on July 6, 2004, from an overdose of alcohol and drugs at the age of 46. In 2017, the couple released a book, Kirk and Anne: Letters of Love, Laughter and a Lifetime in Hollywood, that revealed intimate letters they shared through the years. Throughout their marriage Douglas had affairs with other women including several Hollywood starlets, though he never hid his infidelities from his wife, who was accepting of them and explained: 'as a European, I understood it was unrealistic to expect total fidelity in a marriage.'
Rape allegation
Douglas is alleged to have raped actress Natalie Wood in the summer of 1955 when she was aged 16 and he was 38 years old. In 2018, Natalie's sister Lana Wood said during a 12-part podcast about her sister's life that the attack had occurred inside the Chateau Marmont during an audition and went on 'for hours'. According to professor Cynthia Lucia, who studied the attack, Wood's rape was brutal and violent. In the 2021 memoir Little Sister: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood, Lana Wood alleged Douglas was her sister's assailant. Douglas' son Michael issued a statement saying, 'May they both rest in peace.'
Health problems and death
On January 28, 1996, at age 79, Douglas suffered a severe stroke, which impaired his ability to speak. Doctors told his wife that unless there was rapid improvement, the loss of the ability to speak was likely permanent. After a regimen of daily speech-language therapy that lasted several months, his ability to speak returned, although it was still limited. He was able to accept an honorary Academy Award two months later in March and thanked the audience. He wrote about this experience in his 2002 book, My Stroke of Luck, which he hoped would be an 'operating manual' for others on how to handle a stroke victim in their own family.
Douglas died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, surrounded by his family on February 5, 2020, aged 103. His cause of death was kept private. Douglas's funeral was held at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on February 7, 2020, two days after his death. He was buried in the same plot as his son Eric. On April 29, 2021, his wife Anne died and was buried next to him and their son.