Natalie Wood: A Life

She spent her life in the movies. Her childhood is still there to see in Miracle on 34th Street. Her adolescence in Rebel Without a Cause. Her coming of age? Still playing in Splendour in the Grass and West Side Story. From the moment Natalie Wood made her debut aged seven in 1946, to her shocking, untimely death in 1981, the decades of her life are marked by movies that summed up America's dreams. Now Gavin Lambert, whose twenty-year friendship with Natalie Wood began when she wanted to star in the movie adaptation of his novel Inside Daisy Clover, tells her extraordinary story: her parents, her marriages and divorces and love affairs, her suicide attempt at twenty-six, the birth of her children, her friendships, her struggles as an actress, and her tragic death by drowning (she was always terrified of water) at forty-three.