Biography by: Gavin Lambert

Natalie Wood’s colourful life began and ended in mystery. Her curious death at sea in 1981 brought a telegram of condolence from Queen Elizabeth to Wood’s husband, the movie star Robert Wagner, and had the scandal sheets talking of murder and suicide. She was born in San Francisco in 1938, but there are considerable doubts over her paternity. Her story reaches back to the Russian Revolution and the eastward flight of Wood’s mother with her family when the news of the Romanovs’ demise reached their estate in southern Siberia. This could be the stuff of a Kitty Kelly showbiz biography or a Jerome Robbins roman-à-clef dishing the dirt on Hollywood. But though this book doesn’t stint on sordid revelations about daily life in Tinseltown, Wood’s life and career are safe in the hands of Gavin Lambert, who has a rare combination of talents. He is an outstanding film critic, a gifted biographer, the author of some of the shrewdest fiction written about Hollywood, and has been closely involved in moviemaking as a screenwriter.

Moreover, they have something in common. Both had sex with the charismatic bisexual Nicholas Ray on the day they met him. Lambert’s encounter was in London and he followed Ray to Los Angeles as his assistant. Shortly after his arrival he encountered Natalie Wood, who earlier that same year had lost her virginity at the age of sixteen to Ray while he was testing her for Rebel Without a Cause, a film that would change the course of her career. Lambert became one of her many gay friends, and a decade later, in 1965, she appeared in a film version of Lambert’s novel Inside Daisy Clover as the eponymous troubled movie star.

Wood’s mother Maria was a manipulative monster, even worse than the stage mother Rosalind Russell played to Wood’s Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy. A romantic fantasist obsessed with her lost Russian heritage, she had a brief marriage to an army officer in China (which produced a daughter), before crossing the Pacific to San Francisco. There she contracted a hypergamous relationship with a Russian émigré from a more humble background, a dockworker who also felt cut off from his roots and was violent when drunk. “What did your father die of?” someone was later to ask Natalie. “My mother”, she replied. Natalie was born four months after the marriage, and though she was never to know it, her real father was almost certainly a brutish Russian-born captain in the American merchant navy with whom Maria conducted a lifelong affair. The mother was determined to turn one of her three daughters into a star, and in 1943 she ordered the five-year-old Natalie to go and sit on the knee of Irving Pichel, who was directing a movie in Santa Rosa, the little town north of San Francisco where they lived. She and her older sister Olga got walk-on roles in crowd scenes, and immediately Maria shifted the family down to Los Angeles and began grooming Natalie for the screen.

After an impressive debut as Orson Welles’s ward in the 1945 weepie, Tomorrow Is Forever (Welles recalled “something very sad and lonely about this compelling child”), she became an established child performer and the family’s meal ticket. She played orphans, brat sisters, plucky victims of divorce; her characteristic role, Lambert observes, was “an emotionally displaced child whose problems are resolved by understanding adults (thanks, of course, to the understanding filmmakers who contrive a happy ending)”. Over the next few years her film mothers were Gene Tierney, Margaret Sullivan, Joan Blondell, Maureen O’Hara and Bette Davis, her screen fathers James Stewart, Bing Crosby, Walter Brennan and Fred McMurray. In the greatest film of her early days she was unhappily cast as John Wayne’s niece in John Ford’s The Searchers.

Maria pushed and pushed, became the keeper of her daughter’s fan mail, and, using Natalie as a lever, got her husband a job as a carpenter at 20th-Century Fox. One day he came onto the set of a film she was appearing in, and (in something resembling a scene from a Joan Crawford tearjerker) she called out “Daddy”. Everyone was shocked, and Maria told her she must never again acknowledge her father’s presence at the studio.

Natalie grew up in Hollywood at a time when the big studio system was reluctantly giving way to independent production. She found herself under contract to Warner Brothers, whose penny-pinching production boss, Jack Warner, supervised her career, making ten times her weekly contract payment by hiring her out to other studios. The House Un-American Activities Committee stalked the movie colony and everyone was in thrall to the suffocating conformity of the Eisenhower era. In this enclosed world Natalie had to play the game, kow-towing to the vindictive gossip columnists Loella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. She also had to cope with the near-insanity of Maria, whose account of a Russian Gypsy’s curse induced a lifelong terror of “dark waters” in her daughter. Anticipating the horror movies of Wes Craven by some forty years, Maria told Natalie of a figure called “Jack the Jabber” who stabbed errant girls through the backs of cinema seats. She didn’t, however, offer information about menstruation, and Natalie never recovered from the shock of her first period.

Unlike most child stars, Natalie made the transition to adult performer: she became a piercingly brown-eyed, black-haired beauty and an actor of feeling and subtlety. Rebel without a Cause was the turning point that preceded key roles in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass opposite Warren Beatty and Robert Mulligan’s Love with the Proper Stranger opposite Steve McQueen. Playing desperate victims of a repressive culture, she attained Hollywood star status, and was Oscar-nominated for all three performances. In between the last two there was West Side Story, which made her bankable. She worked under constant pressure from family, studio and filmmakers, and it would seem that sex became her principal act of rebellion, recreation and self-assertion. Lambert uses that curious old-fashioned term “highly sexed” to describe her, and suggests that her sex drive was part of the Russian heritage she readily embraced. But her conduct didn’t differ markedly from that of Sinatra, Beatty, McQueen and other male stars acclaimed for their arrogant concupiscence. They figure among several dozen famous lovers, including our own gently retiring Tom Courtenay, who happened to be in Hollywood making King Rat in 1965. Like Princess Diana, Natalie had an inner circle, which she called her “nucleus” (the equivalent of Diana’s “rocks”), a larger group she called her friends, and within it a special section known as “friends you occasionally sleep with”.

This permissiveness was subject to limits. When her second husband, the British talent agent Richard Gregson, father of the first of her three children, was revealed as having had a fling with her secretary, Natalie called the police, who escorted him off her Beverly Hills mansion with his bags and baggage. She herself expected to be forgiven for her transgressions and flirtations during her first and third marriages to the same man, the charming Robert Wagner, who had broken away from his upper-middle-class background to become a movie actor. It was a turbulent relationship the second time around, their reputations shifting month by month through the successes and failures of their work in television, and not helped by alcohol and Natalie’s increasing reliance on prescription drugs to calm her nerves and prepare her for social occasions.

Neither had any serious professional training, and their shared insecurity appears to have been played on by the brilliant, demonic Christopher Walken, who starred with Natalie in the misconceived science-fiction melodrama Brainstorm in 1981, and was probably her lover. He seems, quite legitimately from his position as a committed New York stage actor, to have challenged them to address their professional careers with greater seriousness. During a holiday break from shooting, Walken joined the Wagners on their yacht. They cruised to the holiday island of Catalina; immoderate amounts of booze were consumed and dangerous words exchanged. The next day the ship’s motorized dinghy was retrieved along the coast and Natalie’s body (filled with alcohol and prescription drugs) was fished out of the sea. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death: she had slipped on a greasy strip of teak while preventing the banging of the dinghy that was keeping her awake. As far as Tinseltown history is concerned, the jury is still out.

The yacht was named Splendor after the movie that was Natalie’s greatest triumph, and the dinghy was called Valiant, an ironic reference to the Arthurian comic-strip epic Prince Valiant which made Wagner a star in 1954. The celebrated golden couple were mocked and patronized in much the same way that the Beckhams are today, and glib judgements are unfair in both cases. Lambert rightly claims that Natalie was on the point of regaining control of her own career at the time of her death. She had always wanted to play Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and regularly interrogated Lambert about Vivien Leigh, whom he had come to know as a result of writing the screenplay for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. Natalie had performed creditably with Robert Wagner in a television version of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the weakest element of which was Laurence Olivier’s Big Daddy. Natalie had acquired the rights to Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and was preparing to make her stage debut (at the age of forty-three) in Anastasia with Wendy Hiller. This all suggests sanity and ambition. But she seems also to have seen her life as a split screen; towards the end, she took to leaving different messages on her agent’s phone as, variously, “Natalie”, “Natalie Wood” and “Mrs Wagner”. Perhaps this was a joke, for she had become a mistress of irony.

Living in Hollywood all her life, Natalie must have become aware that most childhood stars would, sooner or later, sink into painful obscurity. Robert and Natalie entertained to dinner an elderly, drunken Bette Davis. Talking of her performance in The Star, Davis said: “But of course, you’re too young to remember it”. “Bette,” Natalie replied, “I played your daughter in that picture.” Davis went on unheeded.

The death of Natalie Wood had a predictably sordid aftermath in legal actions, family squabbles and old acquaintances spilling dubious beans to ensure their moment of fame and a few tarnished dollars. This Gavin Lambert scrupulously records. But he also takes away the sour taste in our mouths and the guilty feeling that we may have been engaged in a prurient exercise. His sensitive, sympathetic book ends with a coda that reviews Wood’s movies and the development of her career over a period of thirty years. It guarantees her position in movie history.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Biography to: The Guardian

First of all, she was Russian; and the great acting teacher Stella Adler once commented on the uniquely Russian "extreme sensibility of reacting, caring, feeling". Natalie Wood's parents, who fled the 1917 revolution with very little money and no prospects, first met after they settled in San Francisco. It was a flammable match between two very different emotional extremists: Maria Gurdin had one ruling passion, to create a future for herself through her daughter, whom she admittedly "raised to become a movie star". Nicholas Gurdin, basically gentle but weak, was fixated on a past that the revolution had forced him to leave behind. The more he lamented it, the more he drank - and erupted with violent rage.

For her actor friend George Segal, "nobody could lose control on the screen like Natalie", and he cited her extraordinarily intense breakdown scenes in Splendour in the Grass, Inside Daisy Clover and the television movie The Cracker Factory, as well as her near-breakdown before leaving the family home in Love With the Proper Stranger.

In fact, the first time Natalie lost control on the screen was in her first film Tomorrow is Forever. She was seven years old, and cast as an Austrian orphan from the second world war. To ensure that she'd cry on demand when she tested for the part, Maria primed her with a hair-raising account of watching a boy tear off the wings of a live bird. Because Natalie had talent as well as star quality, she'd have cried anyway, although maybe not so wildly as to amaze the director and producer when they ran the test.

Maria, no mean actress herself in the cause of manipulation, continued to implant all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties in her daughter, most dangerously that only Maria herself could be trusted. It was only after Maria had put her through another 16 movies and three TV shows during the next eight years that Natalie was able to catch her breath, and realise that not only her mother but her directors had always told her what to think and feel, leaving no time to think and feel for herself.

In many of those 1940s and early 1950s movies, the Wonder Child, as she quickly became known, played the daughter of ideal parents in an ideal world where all problems and misunderstandings were resolved in the end.

Not surprisingly, she felt happier in a make-believe studio home than in the real world of a drunken father and a mother who replaced warm affection with a cold shoulder when Natalie lost a part. But when she finally began to look back on her life, she had to confront the fact that by escaping into a cunningly fabricated illusion of reality, and posing for publicity photos of growing up in a "normal" family, she'd lost her real self.

As often happen with actors, a role helped her find it again. Two years later, when Nicholas Ray cast 17-year-old Natalie as Judy in Rebel Without a Cause, she found a mirror image in the character of an adolescent girl alienated from her family, and impatient to rebel. And after years of being told what to do and think, she was astonished by a director who asked her opinion of a scene and even encouraged criticism, and by James Dean, who insisted on exploring a scene in different ways until he found the approach that felt right.

Creative and sexual liberation went hand in hand when Ray became Natalie's first lover; and shortly afterward she invited Dennis Hopper, who was cast in a supporting role, to become her second. Recalling how she made the first move, and "the cool way she handled two simultaneous affairs", Hopper realised she was "way ahead of her time".

But the price of liberation, her first Academy nomination, and eventual stardom was high. It involved a seven-year contract with Warner Bros, and a frustrating series of mediocre parts in mediocre movies, with the exception of John Ford's The Searchers, in which she (rightly) felt miscast. A lost childhood had left Natalie painfully insecure, and her personal life soon foundered: a brief first marriage (to Robert Wagner) that ended abruptly in divorce, like the second (to a leading British talent agent, Richard Gregson); years of psychoanalysis to undo her mother's work, and the lapses into uncontrollable panic or melancholy it had caused; years of affairs, some serious (with Warren Beatty), and some not (with Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen), but most as short-lived as her marriages; one serious suicide attempt, and one not.

Released from professional bondage in 1961, when Elia Kazan cast her in Splendour in the Grass, Natalie won a second Oscar nomination in a movie that established her as a star. Throughout the 1960s she gave a series of outstanding performances, working with directors she admired: in Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan), Inside Daisy Clover (Mulligan again), This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack), Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (Paul Mazursky). "She had a quiet determination to grow as an actress," Mulligan recalled. "No declarations. It was just there."

"When the persona fit the character," said Kazan, "you couldn't do better." The characters that fitted it best were outsiders, in rebellion against authority or their families. But win or lose she remained vulnerable, one of the reasons that Natalie particularly appealed to women and gay men. From the first, Robert Wagner noted, she accepted something generally considered unacceptable at the time, and formed "many friendships with gay men". During the Warner years, her best male friend was Tab Hunter, and her later circle included playwright Mart Crowley, Howard Jeffrey, dancer and assistant to Jerry Robbins, Jerry Robbins himself (who once proposed marriage), Rock Hudson, Roddy McDowall, John Schlesinger and me.

When I first got to know Natalie during the 1960s, she was at her professional peak. Enjoying stardom while shrewdly aware of its unreality, she was accessible, loyal, generous, with a pungent sense of humour. But the child-woman's interior demons were still stirring, and only seemed to rest when she remarried Wagner in 1973. After several chance encounters - during which they made only small talk, but "the subtext was loaded" as Wagner said - they decided they'd always been in love. As Natalie explained: "We got back to where we started, and should have stayed."

She'd already had one daughter by Gregson, was eager for another child by Wagner, and after the birth of a second daughter, concentrated on motherhood and domestic life for three years. In Hollywood-speak, it was a bad career move. At 38, Natalie (like all famous screen beauties) was close to being considered over the hill, and knew it. Typically, when offered good roles on TV, she didn't consider the small screen a comedown, but welcomed the opportunity to do some of her best work. At Laurence Olivier's invitation, Natalie and Wagner played Maggie and Brick to his Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She followed this with the Deborah Kerr role in a mini-series based on From Here to Eternity, and a harrowing portrait of a disturbed housewife in The Cracker Factory.

Its director, Burt Brinckerhoff, found Natalie "at the top of her game", but also realised that her interior demons were stirring again. During the last two years of her life, they became fully awake, and the rest of the story is of addiction to painkillers and too much white wine out of frustration at a stalled career: the final movie, Brainstorm, she accepted because there was nothing better on offer; her infatuation with its leading man, Christopher Walken, and the tension it caused in her marriage; the increasingly tense and drunken weekend on the Wagner yacht that ended with Natalie's accidental drowning.

All this leaves me with only one thing to add. In Meteor (a last resort dud that preceded Brainstorm), the role obliged her to be buried under a million tons of mud when a large chip of extraterrestrial matter fell on Manhattan. And after her death, Natalie was buried under a myriad tons of tabloid mud - was it murder or suicide, which one of the three was really making it with the other etc etc? It completely submerged the person and the actress - and one reason I wanted to write about Natalie was to clear the sludge away.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000

En Español, por: Paco Granados

Nacida el 20 de Julio de 1938, en San Francisco (California), con el nombre de Natascha Gurdin. Muerta en el mar, frente a la isla de Santa Catalina, el 29 de Noviembre de 1981. Hija de emigrantes rusos. Su padre Nikolai Zacharenko, cambiaría su nombre por el mas americanizado: Nicholas Gurdin. Su madre María Kuleff, antigua bailarina clásica: cegada por las luces de Hollywood: deseaba que su hija heredara sus sueños de actriz: haciéndola interpretar y disfrazarse. En 1943, en la ciudad de Santa Rosa, el cineasta Irving Pichel, desembarcó su maquinaria cinematográfica, para el rodaje de “HAPPY LAND”, la pequeña que estaba viendo el rodaje, empujada por su madre, se acercó a Pichel, se sentó en sus rodillas, y le cantó una canción, el director fascinado, la premió con un pequeño papel, debutando ante las cámaras con tan solo cuatro años de edad. Pero su autentico debut fue dos años después, cuando Pichel la reclamó para un importante papel en “MAÑANA ES VIVIR”, una ambiciosa película con la que aparecería por primera vez, con el nombre de: Natalie Wood. El éxito fue fulgurante, recibiendo el placet de la critica, e iniciando una carrera en la que no existía el descanso. En 1947, firmó un contrato con la FOX. por 1.000 dolares semanales, convirtiéndose en una de las estrellas infantiles mejor pagadas, trabajando con los más importantes astros del firmamento Hollywoodense: Orson Welles, Barbara Stanwyck, Rex Harrison, James Stewart, Jane Wyman, Bette Davis... Y con títulos tan famosos como: “DE ILUSIÓN TAMBIEN SE VIVE” “EL FANTASMA Y LA Sra MUIR” “LA ESTRELLA”... Su ambiciosa madre, no cesaba de firmar contratos: quería que su niña fuese una gran estrella; ya que una gitana le predijo que tendría una hija que enamoraría al mundo entero, pero también le advirtió, que tuviera cuidado con las "aguas oscuras"; motivo por el que Natalie siempre le tuvo autentico pánico al mar. María, instruía a su hija como interpretar sus escenas: no reparaba en medios para sacar una buena interpretación; en una ocasión que se requería que la pequeña llorase con desconsuelo, consiguió las lagrimas de Natalie, arrancándole las alas a una mariposa. Durante el rodaje de "THE GREEN PROMISE" en una escena en la que tenía que cruzar un puente, había un truco en el que el puente se derrumbaba cuando ella lo cruzara, el efecto se hizo antes de tiempo, y Natalie caía al río, la pequeña presa del pánico que le producía estar dentro del agua se rompió una muñeca, pero su madre prefirió ocultarlo porque su pequeña estrella no se podía romper. En 1953, Natalie ya no es la niña que enamoraba las plateas de la posguerra, estaba en esa edad en la que muchas estrellas infantiles fracasaban, y decidió no volver ante las cámaras, pero María no estaba dispuesta que su hija abandonara su carrera; empujando sus nuevos pasos a la televisión, prometiéndole a cambio, libertad en sus devaneos amorosos. En los dos próximos años, trabajó en este medio consiguiendo gran popularidad, pero estaba escrito que su autentico éxito sería en la gran pantalla. Su paso a actriz adulta fue en la mítica “REBELDE SIN CAUSA”, con el malogrado James Dean. Dean la propuso como partenaire pues había trabajado con ella en televisión, pero el camino para conseguir este ansiado papel, estaba lleno de deficultades; ya que los productores la recordaban con trenzas o de hija de algún famoso. Natalie no cedió en su empeño, ya que sabía que el papel de Judy estaba echo a su medida, finalmente el presidente de la Warner, Jack, dió su bendición, y se hizo con el papel más envidiado del momento. El éxito de la cinta acompañado de la trágica muerte de James, catapulto a Natalie al primer plano de la actualidad, recibiendo su primera nominación a los Oscars: como mejor actriz de reparto. Durante el rodaje de Rebelde, las publicaciones de actualidad, la relacionaban sentimentalmente con su compañero de reparto; cuando en realidad, era el director de la cinta Nicholas Ray, con el que tuvo una relación amorosa, pese a la diferencia de edad, Ray contaba con 43 años y ella 16. Finalizado el rodaje el romance se desvanece. Con solo dieciseis años, la joven promesa, se convirtió en realidad. En esta época, según la escritora Suzanne Finstad, Natalie sufriría uno de los episodios más dramáticos de su vida, fue "violada" por un famoso actor de Hollywood: María no permitió que saliese a la luz este episodio ya que podría perjudicar la carrera ascendente de su hija: la autora tampoco nos revela el nombre del violador, dejando otro capitulo oculto en la trágica vida de Natalie Wood. En 1956 trabajó en otra obra inolvidable: “CENTAUROS DEL DESIERTO” Pero los próximos trabajos, bajo contrato con Warner Brothers, no aportaba nada nuevo a su carrera; fue cuando el cineasta Elia Kazan se fijo en ella para ser la heroína de su nueva obra “ESPLENDOR EN LA HIERBA” consiguiendo una interpretación memorable y su segunda nominación al Oscar, ese mismo año conseguiría otro gran éxito en su papel de María en “WEST SIDE STORY”, película galardonada con 10 Oscars, no pudiendo optar al premio ya que ese año era candidata por Esplendor en la Hierba. Siguió cosechando buenas interpretaciones como en "AMORES CON UN EXTRAÑO", con la que en 1963 optó de nuevo al premio de la academia. Otras cintas de las que destacamos“PROPIEDAD CONDENADA” “BOB CAROL TED Y ALICE”... En su madurez la encontremos más seductora que nunca en varias adaptaciones televisivas de películas de éxito: “LA GATA SOBRE EL TEJADO DEL ZINC” “DE AQUÍ A LA ETERNIDAD” con la que consiguió el Globo de Oro...Casada en 1957, con el actor Robert Wagner, parecia que había encontrado la estabilidad sentimental. La aparición de Warren Beatty durante el rodaje de Esplendor, unida a la sospecha, de que Natalie sorprendió a Robert en compañía de otro hombre "Wagner ha negado su supuesta bisexualidad" se divorciaron en 1962. Acabada también su relación con Beatty, contrajo nuevas nupcias con el productor Richard Gregson en 1969, del que nacería su hija Natasha (Hoy famosa actriz, con el nombre de Natasha Gregson Wagner) divorciándose en 1971. Un año después, ocurriría lo que solo pasa en las películas, volvería a contraer matrimonio con su primer marido: Robert Wagner, Bob también pasó por otro matrimonio fallido "Marion Marshall" con la que nació "Kate". De nuevo juntos, aumentarían la familia con el nacimiento de: Courtney. Durante el rodaje de su ultima película: “PROYECTO BRAINSTORM”, en una noche de alcohol y discusiones con su esposo, a bordo de su yate “Splendour” apareció ahogada en el mar, "esas aguas oscuras que le predijo la gitana" dejando todo tipo de hipótesis sin desvelar sobre su muerte.El día 1 de Febrero de 1987, en el “Walk of Fame” (El bulevar de la fama), cerca del Roosevelt Hotel, de Hollywood, se descubrió una estrella, en memoria de otra estrella.. .NATALIE WOOD

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

At the funeral service for Natalie Wood, who drowned in 1981 when she was only 43, the honorary pallbearers included a who’s who of Hollywood of the 1960s: Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson, Elia Kazan, Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck and Frank Sinatra.

Natalie in a Romanov dream like her mother almost fifty years earlier, photographed by Michael Childers for the Anastasia poster.

The production was sceduled to open in February

NATALIE WOOD: AWARDS

1946

BOX OFFICE MAGAZINE
…..WON: Blue Ribbon Award for Most Talented Young Actress (Tomorrow is Forever)

1947

BOX OFFICE MAGAZINE
…..WON: Won consecutive Box Office Blue Ribbon Awards for Most Talented Young Actress (Miracle on 34 th Street)
"Parents" Magazine
.....WON "Most Talented Juvenile Stars of 1947" (Miracle on 34 th Street)

1948

Critics Award
.....WON for (Scudda Hoo Scudda Hay)

1949

Silver Cup
.....WON "Child Star of the Year 1949" for (Father was a Fullback)

1956

ACADEMY AWARDS
…..NOMINATED: Oscar Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Rebel Without A Cause)

MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE
…..WON: Modern Screen Award for Favorite New Star

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF THEATRE OWNERS
…..WON: Star of Tomorrow Award

1957

GOLDEN GLOBES
…..WON: Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer - Female (Rebel Without A Cause)
Together with Carroll Baker and Jayne Mansfield.

1958

INTERSTATE CIRCUIT OF THEATRES
…..WON: Golden Script Award for Star of the Year

LAUREL AWARDS
…..NOMINATED, 5th place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Dramatic Performance (Marjorie Morningstar)
…..NOMINATED, 13th place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star

1959

LAUREL AWARDS
…..NOMINATED, 7th place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star

1960

LAUREL AWARDS
…..NOMINATED, 9th place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star

1961

GOLDEN APPLE AWARDS
…..WON: Sour Apple Award for Least Cooperative Actress

GRAUMAN’S CHINESE THEATRE
…..INDUCTED: Handprint Ceremony

LAUREL AWARDS
…..NOMINATED, 14th place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star

1962

ACADEMY AWARDS
…..NOMINATED: Oscar Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Splendor in the Grass)

GOLDEN GLOBE
…..NOMINATED: Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Drama (Splendor in the Grass)

GRAMMY AWARDS
…..NOMINATED: Grammy Award for Album of the Year (West Side Story)
LAUREL AWARDS
…..WON, 3rd place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Dramatic Performance (Splendor in the Grass)
…..NOMINATED, 5th place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star

1963

BAFTA AWARDS
…..NOMINATED: BAFTA Film Award for Best Foreign Actress (Splendor in the Grass)
GOLDEN GLOBE
…..NOMINATED: Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Comedy or Musical (Gypsy)

LAUREL AWARDS
…..WON, 2nd place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Musical Performance (Gypsy)
…..WON, 3rd place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star

1964

ACADEMY AWARDS
…..NOMINATED: Oscar Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Love With the Proper Stranger)

GOLDEN GLOBES
…..NOMINATED: Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Drama (Love With the Proper Stranger)

LAUREL AWARDS
…..WON, 2nd place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Dramatic Performance (Love With the Proper Stranger)
…..WON, 3rd place: Golden Laurel Award for Top Female Star
MAR DEL PLATA FILM FESTIVAL
…..WON: Ombú Award for Best Actress (Love With the Proper Stranger)

1965

LAUREL AWARDS
…..NOMINATED, 5th place: Golden Laurel Award for Female Comedy Performance (Sexy and the Single Girl)
…..NOMINATED, 6th place: Golden Laurel Award for Female Star

1966

GOLDEN APPLE AWARDS
…..WON: Sour Apple Award for Least Cooperative Actress

GOLDEN GLOBES
…..NOMINATED: Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Comedy or Musical (Inside Daisy Clover)
…..WON: Henrietta Award for World Film Favorite - Female
HARVARD CRIMSON
…..WON: Crimson Welcomes a Good Sport Award
HARVARD LAMPOON
…..WON: Harvard Lampoon’s Worst Actress Award - “for this year, next year, and the following year”

LAUREL AWARDS
…..NOMINATED, 8th place: Golden Laurel Award for Female Star

1967

GOLDEN GLOBES
…..NOMINATED: Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Drama (This Property is Condemned)
LAUREL AWARDS
…..WON, 3rd place: Golden Laurel Award for Female Dramatic Performance (This Property is Condemned)
…..WON, 3rd place: Golden Laurel Award for Female Star