Natalie Wood, born Natalie Zacharenko on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California, was an American actress who began her career as a child and successfully transitioned to young adult roles. She started acting at age four and was given a co-starring role at age eight in "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947).

As a teenager, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), followed by a role in John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956).

Natalie Wood starred in the musical films "West Side Story" (1961) and "Gypsy" (1962) and received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) and "Love with the Proper Stranger" (1963).

Her career continued with films such as "Sex and the Single Girl" (1964), "The Great Race" (1965), "Inside Daisy Clover" (1965), and "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" (1969). During the 1970s, she began a hiatus from film and had two daughters: one with her second husband Richard Gregson, and one with Robert Wagner, her first husband whom she married again after divorcing Gregson.

She acted in only two feature films throughout the decade, but she appeared slightly more often in television productions, including a remake of "From Here to Eternity" (1979) for which she won a Golden Globe Award.

Her films represented a "coming of age" for her and for Hollywood films in general. On November 29, 1981, at the age of 43, she drowned in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Catalina Island during a break from production of her would-be comeback film "Brainstorm" (1983).

She was with her husband Wagner and Brainstorm co-star 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 her death.