TCM is running a Natalie Wood film festival this month. Back in my sane and
sober youth I loved me some Natalie Wood. For little boys of color she was the
ethnic "it" girl. Russian descended Natasha Zacharenko played
white-girl-turned-Native-American ("The Searchers"), Hispanic ("West Side
Story"), Jewish (Marjorie Morningstar) and Italian ("Love With the Proper
Stranger").
Wood had this ineluctable quality of being able to play both the tomboy
("Gyspy" and "Inside Daisy Clover") and the vixen ("Gypsy" and
"Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice"); the ingenue ("West Side Story") and the full-fledged
woman ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"). She was Annette Funicello and Marilyn Monroe
rolled into one. And, for this child of the sixties and seventies, that was a
heady combination.
I felt as if I had suffered a personal loss when Wood accidentally drowned
while filming "Brainstorm" in 1983.
~rave!
