November 29th, 1981. Catalina Island, California. Somewhere in the dark water off the coast, America’s sweetheart was gone. She had been afraid of dark water her entire life. She had told people, repeated it in interviews, said it plainly. She loved being near the water, near it, but never in it. And now, she was in it.
Back in their home on the mainland, two little girls were asleep. One was 11. One was seven. Neither knew yet that their world was about to end. This is the story of what happened to those two girls, and what the loss of their mother made of their lives. The woman they lost. To understand what Natalie Wood’s death cost her daughters, you have to understand who she was.
Not the film star, not the magazine cover, but the woman they knew as their mother. She was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko on July 20th, 1938 in San Francisco, California. The daughter of Russian immigrants who had fled Europe with almost nothing and rebuilt their lives in America. Her father, Nikolai, was a carpenter.
Her mother, Maria, was a woman of fierce ambition and, by multiple accounts, a willingness to use any available means to pursue it. When a fortune teller told Maria that she would give birth to an exquisite little girl who would become a famous movie star, Maria received it not as a flattering prediction, but as a plan to execute.
The caveat that the same prophecy described this beautiful child’s life ending in a drowning in dark water was not kept from the girl who would carry it. Maria passed the fear along, folded it into Natalie from childhood, and it became one of the deepest and most consistent facts of her interior life. She was terrified of water.
Specifically, deeply, she was afraid of dark water. She wouldn’t enter her own swimming pool. She gave interviews for decades in which she described the fear plainly. Near the water, yes. In the water, no. Only weeks before her death, she had told a journalist that she was afraid of water that was dark. The fear had never left her, not in 43 years.
The fear had roots beyond the prophecy. When Natalie was 10 years old, filming a scene in The Green Promise that required her to cross a bridge over turbulent water, the bridge was rigged to collapse at a predetermined moment. Her mother told her it was perfectly safe. When Natalie reached the midpoint, the bridge collapsed and she was thrown into the river, clinging desperately to the wreckage.
She was pulled out, physically unharmed, but the experience was its own kind of scar on top of the one the prophecy had already made. From that point, the fear deepened into something closer to a phobia. Nightmares about drowning, an inability to be near moving water without anxiety, a reluctance so severe she had to fight it on film sets when directors required water scenes.
Bette Davis once threatened to leave a production rather than allow a director to force the young Natalie to swim to a raft, defending the child actress when the director would not listen. Her film career began before she could read. She made her debut at four in a bit part in a 1943 film, then starred at six alongside Orson Welles and Claudette Colbert in Tomorrow is Forever.
At nine, she played Susan Walker, the sensible, skeptical little girl in Miracle on 34th Street, and delivered a performance of such naturalness that audiences felt they were watching a child think in real time. By the time she was 18, she had already been nominated three times for an Academy Award. She was the rare thing, a child star who became an adult star without the awkward, grinding transition that claimed most of her contemporaries.
Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, Splendor in the Grass in 1961, West Side Story, also in 1961, Gypsy in 1962. Film after film, decade after decade, she was present and luminous and entirely real on screen in a way that the camera can’t manufacture. She was one of Hollywood’s most consistently admired actresses from the time she was a child until well into her 40s, and she earned every moment of it through genuine work rather than manufactured celebrity.
But her childhood had been shaped by forces that left damage alongside the stardom. Her mother, Maria, was a stage mother of the most extreme variety. She had pushed Natalie relentlessly from the age of four, controlled her environment and her relationships, and according to various accounts, had made choices about how to advance Natalie’s career that no responsible parent should have made.
The biography of Natalie Wood, researched across more than 400 interviews by Suzanne Finstad, describes a childhood in which accomplishment and trauma were inseparable and in which Maria’s ambition was the organizing principle of the family’s entire existence. She was also, by the accounts of everyone who knew her privately, the same person off screen as she appeared on it.
Warm, funny, genuinely interested in people, an extravagant celebrator of every holiday and birthday and occasion that she could find an excuse to mark. She filled her home with flowers. She told Russian fairy tales at bedtime. She made Easter and Christmas and Halloween into productions of love and attention.
Her daughters have spoken about their childhood with a particular tenderness, describing the feeling of a home filled with light and affection, a mother who made every moment feel chosen. She was the center of something. When she left, the center did not hold. Two little girls and a changed world. Natasha Gregson was born on September 29th, 1970, the daughter of Natalie and her second husband, British film producer Richard Gregson.
The marriage had seemed promising. Gregson was intelligent, accomplished, and devoted, but it did not survive. They separated when Natasha was 10 months old and divorced in 1972. Richard Gregson remained in his daughter’s life and maintained a relationship with her throughout, but the daily reality of her upbringing was shaped by what came next.
What came next was Natalie’s reunion with Robert Wagner. Wagner, known to almost everyone in their lives as RJ, had been Natalie’s first husband. They had married in 1957 when both were young and beautiful and Hollywood’s favorite romantic pairing. That marriage had ended in 1962, damaged by various pressures.
They had both gone on to live their lives and then after careers that took them through the 1960s and other relationships, they found their way back to each other in the early 1970s. They remarried in 1972 and the second version of their marriage was by most contemporary accounts warmer and more grounded than the first.
Natalie described the relationship in a 1974 interview as having left the storms behind. Smooth sailing this time around. Courtney Brooke Wagner was born on March 9th, 1974. She was the daughter of both Natalie and Robert, the only child they shared. The family that assembled in the 1970s included Natasha, whom Wagner legally adopted so she could take his name, Courtney, the biological child of both, and Katie Wagner, Robert’s daughter from his second marriage to actress Marion Marshall.
Three girls with different biological configurations, all raised together in the same house in California. With a mother who threw herself into the role of parent with the same energy and commitment she brought to everything else. The home in the 1970s was, by the accounts of multiple people who knew the family, genuinely happy.
Natalie had chosen to step back from the relentless pace of her earlier career in order to be more present for her children. She was deliberate about it. She took on work that didn’t require extended time away, gave interviews in which she described the domestic life as what she had always actually wanted and shaped her days around the rhythms of a household with young children rather than the demands of a major star’s schedule.
Photographs from this period show a family at ease. Birthday parties with absurdly elaborate decorations, beach days, holiday celebrations, Natalie surrounded by her daughters with the expression of someone who has found exactly what she wanted. Natasha and Courtney remembered the house as full of warmth and humor and a sense that the family was the main event, not the career.
They described their mother as funny, fierce, physically affectionate, and completely present when she was with them. Natasha recalled a mother who gave hugs freely and made every ordinary day feel like it contained something worth noticing. Who celebrated Easter and Christmas and Halloween to the maximum.
Who read bedtime stories with genuine dramatic engagement. Who made the children feel like the most important thing in the room. Then, in the late 1970s, Natalie returned more actively to her career. She appeared in a television film called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1976 and began taking on more ambitious projects. By 1979, she was cast alongside Christopher Walken in Brainstorm, a science fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull.
It was a significant production and Natalie threw herself into it with a seriousness that suggested she was enjoying the challenge of being fully back in the professional world. She was also preparing for what would have been her stage debut, a development that those who knew her best described as genuinely exciting for her.
She also remained, throughout this period, afraid of water. It never left her. And in November, 1981, the yacht and the dark water and everything that followed was still ahead. The night at Catalina. Thanksgiving weekend, 1981. Natalie and Robert Wagner, accompanied by Christopher Walken, her co-star on Brainstorm, took their 60-ft motor yacht, the Splendour, out to Catalina Island for the holiday weekend.
A fourth person was aboard, Dennis Davern, the yacht’s captain, who had worked for the Wagners for years. The events of the night of November 28th into the early hours of November 29th have been disputed, re-examined, and reclassified by law enforcement more than once in the decades since. What is established, there was significant drinking that evening.
At some point during the night, a confrontation occurred. Its precise nature and severity have been described differently by different participants. Robert Wagner, in his 2008 memoir, described breaking a wine bottle on the table during an argument with Walken that he characterized as a dispute about Natalie’s career.
Captain Davern’s account, given in his own 2010 book, and in subsequent interviews, described a more serious altercation between Natalie and Wagner and alleged that Wagner delayed calling for help after Natalie disappeared. What is documented by the forensic record, Natalie Wood was found floating in the water near the island at approximately 7:45 in the morning on November 29th.
She was wearing a red down jacket, a jacket that, waterlogged, would have weighed her down considerably, and a nightgown. There were bruises on her body. She was 43 years old. The coroner’s initial ruling was accidental drowning. However, the manner of death was later changed to undetermined by the Los Angeles County Coroner following the reopening of the investigation in 2011, citing the bruising patterns that were inconsistent with a simple accidental fall into the water.
In 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened the investigation. In 2018, detectives named Robert Wagner as a person of interest, not a suspect, but the person they believed had the most information about what had happened that night. Wagner has consistently denied any involvement in his wife’s death, and has declined to cooperate further with investigators.
He has stated publicly that he did not harm Natalie. The case has never been closed, has never been solved, and no charges have ever been filed in connection with her death. On the morning of November 29th, 1981, Robert Wagner came home to his three daughters and told them that their mother was not coming back.
Natasha was 11, Courtney was seven. Natasha, growing up in two worlds, Natasha Gregson, who used the name Natasha Gregson Wagner after her stepfather formally adopted her, was the older of the two daughters, and in many ways, she was the one who carried the weight of consciousness more directly. She was 11 when her mother died, old enough to understand what death meant, old enough to have memories that were complete and detailed, Old enough already to have been defined partly by who her mother was.
She has spoken in multiple interviews and in her 2020 memoir, More Than Love, An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood, about the quality of that morning in November 1981. She described waking to the news as a kind of collapse, the world going from color to black and white, the sound cutting out. The phrase she returned to was that her entire world was shattered.
She had been, she said, always gripped by a fear that something would happen to her mother. The fear had been with her for years before it was realized, a child’s intuition that something precious was precarious. When the thing she feared came true, the grief was not just grief for the present, but for all the future she had already spent quietly dreading.
The years that followed were, by her own account, years of living as a shadow of herself. She was raised by Robert Wagner, who took on the full-time responsibility of parenting all three girls after Natalie’s death. Richard Gregson, Natasha’s biological father, remained present and involved. And Natasha has described herself as having grown up with two fathers rather than one.
Robert, who was her daily parent and with whom she developed a bond she described as deeper than it would have been had Natalie lived, and Richard, who was a presence in her life even as geography and circumstance limited the frequency of their contact. She attended Crossroads School in Santa Monica, then went to Emerson College, then transferred to the University of Southern California.
In 1992, she left USC to pursue an acting career. A decision that was simultaneously the most natural thing in the world and the most complicated given who her mother had been. The acting career that followed was one shaped significantly by independence rather than the family name’s commercial leverage. Natasha appeared in films that were largely independent, edgy, and characterized by roles that had nothing to do with the image her mother had projected.
She appeared in Wes Craven’s thriller Mind Ripper in 1995. She had a role in David Lynch’s Lost Highway in 1997. She co-starred with James Woods, Melanie Griffith, and Vincent Kartheiser in Larry Clark’s crime drama Another Day in Paradise in 1998. A performance in a genuinely challenging film that demonstrated she was operating in a very different register from the classic Hollywood stardom her mother had inhabited.
She appeared in High Fidelity in 2000 alongside John Cusack. She was not trying to be her mother. She was trying to be something else entirely. Something with enough distance from the legend that she could call it her own. There was something deliberate in that. Natalie Wood had been so thoroughly identified with a certain kind of Hollywood beauty and polish and emotional accessibility that anything Natasha did in the same stylistic register would have invited a comparison that could only diminish her.
By going toward the opposite, the darker material, the independent productions, the directors who operated outside the mainstream, she created space for her own identity even as the shadow of her mother’s name followed her everywhere. She has spoken candidly about how her mother’s death shaped her relationship patterns as a young adult.
The pull toward older men with established identities, the difficulty of trust, the particular vulnerability of someone who had lost her primary anchor at 11 years old. Her relationship with Josh Evans, the son of director Robert Evans and actress Ali MacGraw, lasted from 1990 to 1997. She later married screenwriter D. V.
DeVincentis, the co-writer of High Fidelity, in October 2003. They divorced in January 2008. She found greater stability with actor Barry Watson, whom she married in May 2012. Their daughter, Clover, born that same month, became the only grandchild of Natalie Wood. The moment Clover arrived, something shifted for Natasha that she has described with considerable emotion in various interviews.
She became, for the first time, the mother. She was in the position her mother had occupied. She was the one responsible for being the center of someone else’s world. And she found it both profoundly meaningful and profoundly difficult. Because the template she had for motherhood was a woman she had lost when she was 11.
And the grief of that loss was suddenly right next to the joy of the new beginning. She understood, looking at her daughter, something about what her mother had felt looking at her. The continuity across that gap was both beautiful and painful in ways that are hard to articulate. In 2020, the HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, which Natasha co-produced, arrived as the culmination of decades of private reckoning made public.
She had spent years wanting to reclaim her mother’s story from the narrative of the death, which had dominated it for nearly four decades. She wanted people to remember who Natalie Wood was, not just how she died. The documentary was her effort to do exactly that. To put the woman, the mother, the actress, the human being back at the center of a story that had been reduced to a mystery and a set of unanswered questions.
She also published her memoir, More Than Love, that same year. A book that drew on her mother’s journals and home movies and her own memories to offer the fullest portrait yet of the woman behind the star. She has said the experience of making both was healing rather than painful. The home movies, her mother’s journals, the voices of people who had loved Natalie when she was alive, and whose memories were of the living woman, not the unsolved case.
Natasha described the work as putting right something that had been wrong for a long time, restoring the full person to a story that had been flattened into a single terrible night. Courtney, the one who was seven. Courtney Brooke Wagner was 7 years old when her mother died. That sentence contains the essential fact of her story.
7 years old. At seven, you are old enough to know something irreversible has happened. You are old enough to feel the absence in the physical world, the empty chair, the voice that doesn’t come, the bedtime routine that stops. You are not old enough to carry the understanding forward in a continuous way, to have the memories be coherent and accessible.
What you have instead [clears throat] are fragments. The warmth of a feeling, the shape of a person, the sensation of being loved by someone specific, and then the silence where all of that used to be. Courtney recalled waking on the morning of November 29th to the sound of her sister screaming. She recalled the house full of adults who had arrived suddenly, the presence of a nanny who close to her side, her father coming to her and telling her she was not going to see her mother again.
She recalled trying to make sense of it, the way a 7-year-old makes sense of things, which is to hold the facts and wait for them to become real, and then wait some more when they don’t. From as far back as she could remember, she said in the 2020 documentary, her family had been happy. She could remember the feeling of love and happiness in the air.
The love and happiness was real. The people who described Natalie Wood as a mother were describing someone who made home feel like a destination rather than just a location. And then it was gone. And Courtney was seven, and the rest of her life began in that absence. She grew up under Robert Wagner’s care alongside Natasha and Katie, raised in California with the specific burden of being not only a motherless child, but the motherless child of a famous dead woman.
Every year, every anniversary of the death, the story circulated again. The questions about that night on the Splendor, the disputes about what had happened, the tabloid speculation, the books and documentaries and investigations that kept returning to November 29th, 1981, and treating it as the central event of a story that for Courtney was also the story of her own life.
She spoke in interviews years later about how the grief had been something she didn’t know how to process in any healthy way and so had not processed. She had numbed it. She had found things that made the pain quieter, made the noise in her head less constant, made the absence of her mother something she could function around rather than something she had to look directly at.
This pattern, common in people who lose a parent young, particularly under traumatic or unresolved circumstances, had real consequences for her in adulthood. In 2012, Courtney Wagner was 38 years old when police were called to her home in Malibu following a report of screaming and a gunshot. When officers arrived, no one had been injured.
The man with her was for a firearms charge. Courtney herself was found to be in possession of cocaine and heroin and was arrested on suspicion of felony drug possession. She posted a $10,000 bail and was released. The arrest made the news with a particular cruelty. The headlines connected her name to her mother’s as they always did.
And the story of Natalie Wood’s daughter arrested for drug possession was treated by the press as a piece of celebrity gossip rather than as what it actually was, a 40-year grief arriving at its bill. Courtney spoke about it publicly in 2012 with a candor that was both difficult and clearly necessary for her.
She described the label that had been put on her, the sense that she had defamed her mother’s name, the shame of that. She said she had been so upset at the idea of being her mother’s so-called junkie daughter that she had used that shame as fuel to try to find a different way. She said she had to look at how she could make things better, not just for herself, but in some sense for her mother to honor the person she had been rather than add to the painful public narrative surrounding her death.
The grief behind the drug use and this was stated clearly by those close to the family was inseparably connected to the loss of her mother. When Courtney was 7, something was taken from her that could not be replaced. The years had shown that she could not simply not grieve it and be fine. The grief would find its expression one way or another.
She found her way to sobriety. Natasha described her sister in the 2020 People interviews connected to the documentary as someone who lives in the truth, someone whose recovery demands total honesty. She described Courtney as having arrived at a place of real compassion for herself, a forgiveness for the years when she didn’t know how to carry what she’d been given.
Courtney also, in the same period, found creative purpose. She founded a jewelry company channeling something of her mother’s love of beautiful things into a business that was genuinely hers. She spoke at events connected to the documentary. She participated in telling her family’s story in her own voice rather than having it told about her by people who knew less.
She has been clear publicly and repeatedly about her fury at the speculation surrounding her father Robert Wagner, the renewed investigations, the naming of Wagner as a person of interest, the annual recycling of theories about that night. Courtney has described experiencing these as attacks on her family that compound rather than resolve anything.
She has said that certain people continue to keep the speculation alive for their own purposes with no regard for what it costs the people living inside the story. She stands by her father. She has said plainly that she knows him and that the person she knows is incapable of having harmed her mother. Whether that belief is correct is something the investigation has not resolved and may never resolve.
What is certain is the cost, the real, measurable, human cost to a little girl who was seven on the morning of November 29th, 1981 and who has been carrying that morning ever since. What the loss made of them. The two daughters of Natalie Wood are, as of this writing, both alive and both in their 50s. Natasha is in her mid-50s.
Courtney is in her early 50s. They have built lives. They have their own relationships, their own work, their own ways of being in the world. The trajectory from the two little girls of November 1981 to the women they became is not a simple or clean arc, but it is in both cases one that moved eventually towards something real and sustainable.
What the loss made of them is not simply damage, though the damage was real and lasting. It also made them the two people best positioned to tell the world who Natalie Wood was. Not the tabloid subject, not the unsolved mystery, but the woman who told Russian fairy tales at bedtime and celebrated every holiday to maximum excess and gave hugs that her daughters remembered decades later as one of the defining physical sensations of their childhoods.
Natasha produced the documentary. She wrote the memoir. She sat with her mother’s journals and her mother’s home movies and assembled the pieces of a portrait that was always the full human being rather than the Hollywood legend or the drowning victim. She was also in the process of doing all of this, completing a grief that had been interrupted and redirected and managed but never fully resolved.
Doing it at 50 for the 11-year-old who had never quite had the chance to do it properly. This was her particular form of grief work. The long patient project of making sure her mother was not permanently reduced to a mystery. She also became, by the evidence of her own interviews and writing, someone whose life had been given a particular quality of attention and presence by the loss.
Someone who understood because she had learned it the hardest way possible that the people you love can be gone without warning and that the time you have with them is not infinite. Her daughter Clover is being raised by a mother who carries that knowledge. Courtney found her way to sobriety and to an honesty about her own story that required considerable courage.
She spoke openly about the grief and what it had cost her when most people in her position would have stayed silent or deflected. She described, in the 2020 documentary, the specific texture of growing up with a famous dead mother, the peculiar grief of having strangers feel a proprietary connection to your loss, of having the anniversary of the worst day of your life show up annually in tabloid coverage and true crime podcasts and casual jokes on television shows.
She described hearing a comment on a program about a pool party at Natalie Wood’s house and finding it incomprehensible that someone could find that amusing. She also said something in that documentary that landed as the simplest and most true thing any of them had said about the whole story. She said that her father and her sisters experienced a true tragedy together, that they were each traumatized, but that they had each other and that having each other had made living bearable.
Not easy, not healed, bearable. That word, bearable, carries more weight than its three syllables suggest. It is not the language of triumph or recovery or resolution. It is the language of people who have understood something real about grief, that it does not end, that it becomes, over time, something you carry differently rather than something that disappears.
Bearable. Still here. Still carrying it. Still each other’s. The family that had been assembled in the 1970s, Robert Wagner raising three girls through grief, Katie standing beside her younger sisters, Natasha and Courtney, holding to each other across the specificity of their different losses, had held together in ways that are genuinely unusual for families that sustain this kind of blow.
The loss had not broken them apart. It had made the bond between them into something that could not be undone. “Their bond is stronger than any kind of glue,” Katie said. She had been beside them from the very beginning of the worst chapter and had stayed there for decades. The questions that remain. 44 years after Natalie Wood’s body was found floating in the water off Catalina Island, the investigation remains officially open and officially unresolved.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has continued to describe Robert Wagner as a person of interest. Wagner has not been charged with any crime. He has not cooperated with investigators since the case was reopened in 2011. He has maintained consistently that he does not know what happened to his wife and that he did not harm her.
Dennis Davern, the yacht’s captain, gave an account in his 2010 book that differed significantly from Wagner’s and alleged that Wagner had delayed calling for help after Natalie disappeared. Wagner’s account, given in his 2008 memoir published before the case was reopened, described waking to find Natalie gone and the dinghy missing, initially assuming she had gone ashore.
The bruising found on Natalie’s body at the time of her discovery remains unexplained. The cause of death as recorded on her death certificate is drowning. The manner of death was changed from accidental to undetermined in 2012 following the Los Angeles County Coroner’s re-examination of the evidence. Christopher Walken has never publicly spoken in detail about what happened that night.
He gave brief comments to the press in the immediate aftermath of Natalie’s death, expressing his shock and grief. He has not participated in any subsequent investigation or documentary. The dinghy, the one that was missing when Wagner first went looking for Natalie, was found adrift near the island. It showed signs of having been tied and then untied or possibly retied in a different location.
Nothing definitively conclusive was established about how or when Natalie had come to be in the water. What is known and what has never been in dispute is that Natalie Wood had a profound, documented, lifelong terror of dark water. She had spoken of it in interviews. Her friends and family confirmed it. Her sister Lana Wood, in interviews given after the case was reopened, said that the idea of Natalie voluntarily entering the dark water of the Pacific Ocean at night, alone, in a red down jacket and a nightgown in November, made no sense to
anyone who knew her. The jacket she was found wearing would have become enormously heavy when wet, almost immediately compromising her ability to stay above water. For Natasha and Courtney, the unresolved nature of the investigation is not abstract. It is the continuing reality of not knowing with any certainty what the last hours of their mother’s life looked like.
It is the recurring public presence of a story that has been cycling through the media for four decades and that they have to encounter regularly in public spaces and casual conversations. It is the specific and wearing experience of being the children of a famous unresolved case. Natasha has made her position clear in multiple interviews.
She wants the speculation to end. She wants people to remember her mother as who she was, the actress, the mother, the woman, not as a mystery to be solved by amateur investigators on the internet. She produced the documentary specifically to put that version of the story forward, to offer something that was about Natalie Wood the human being, rather than Natalie Wood the cold case.
She has said she believes the tragedy is that her sister and she lost their mother, that Robert Wagner lost his wife, and that the world lost a beloved actress. That is the tragedy. That is what she wants the conversation to be about. Courtney has expressed similar exhaustion with the cycles of speculation and a more pointed anger at the specific people who, in her view, continue to keep the accusations circulating for their own benefit.
She has defended her father with a directness that has made some observers uncomfortable, but that is entirely consistent with the perspective of someone who grew up with the man, knows him as a parent, and cannot reconcile the father she knows with the person being described in the worst versions of the investigation narrative.
None of this resolves anything. The case is open. The manner of death is undetermined. The truth of what happened on the Splendor on the night of November 28th, 1981 may never be established to any standard that satisfies the legal system or the public. What has been established in the years since is something that the investigation cannot touch.
The two daughters who woke on the morning of November 29th to discover their mother was gone have lived full and honest lives. They have faced what they had to face. They have built what they could build, and they have kept their mother present in interviews, in a memoir, in a documentary, in the stories they tell, in the laughter they describe, and the Russian fairy tales they remember.
The woman who was afraid of dark water all her life, who carried a prophecy inside her from childhood and lived alongside it for 43 years, is gone. But the daughters she gave her love to are still here. They are still carrying her in the ways that matter. In the warmth of how they describe her. In the work Natasha has done to restore her as a full human being.
In the honesty Courtney has brought to her own story. In Clover, the only grandchild, who has grown up knowing that her grandmother was Natalie Wood, and knowing, because her mother made sure of it, that this meant something more than fame. Natasha said in the documentary that since her mother’s death, there has been so much focus on how she died that it has overshadowed who she was as a person.
That was what she wanted to change. That was what the memoir and the documentary were for. “The tragedy is that her sister and she lost their mother,” she said, “that their father lost his wife, that the world lost their beloved actress. That is the tragedy, not the mystery, not the investigation, not the decades of speculation.
The tragedy is the mother who was loved by two little girls and is gone from the world at 43 on a November night in the dark water she had been afraid of since before she could read.” If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
