At the of age 9, Natasha Zacharenko stole the hearts of movie-goers in a Christmas classic and at 16, the “teenage queen” gave her heart to a “high school rebel.”
Though likely not related to the traders who once colonized the Russian River Valley of California where her family summered, Natasha was indeed of Russian extraction. Her mother was born in southern Siberia and fled to Harbin, China as a refugee during the Russian Civil War, eventually emigrating to America.
Natasha’s father was originally from the Nikolskoye settlement in far eastern Russia — near both the Sino-Russian border and the Pacific Ocean, which were each less than 40 miles away. His family fled to Shanghai at the onset of the Russian Civil War where the fighting claimed the life of at least one family member. Leaving China, Natasha's father and his family made it to Vancouver, British Columbia, eventually on to California.
After years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Natasha’s family moved to the San Fernando Valley, where she rocketed her way to success as a young ingénue in several Hollywood films and would graduate from Van Nuys High School in 1956.
Just before graduation, she played Duke Wayne's niece in a film that the AFI named the greatest American Western.
At 25, she was the youngest person to be nominated for three Oscars, a feat the 23-year-old Jennifer Lawrence would eclipse in 2013.
In her early 30s, Natasha bore her first child, also named Natasha, and went into semi-retirement, acting in only four more films the rest of her life.
Meanwhile, her sister Svetlana picked up the slack and made waves in Hollywood as a “Bond Girl,” opposite Sean Connery in the Scotsman’s sixth turn as 007.
Years after Natasha’s tragic drowning off the coast of Santa Catalina Island, Svetlana claimed that her sister could not swim and had been “terrified” of water.
Yet the sisters were known to frolic in the waters of the Russian River as children.
A reader of ours reported first-hand knowledge of this, going so far as to say that, as teenage friends who swam in the same waters by day, Svetlana “knew her stuff” in the evening.
The circumstances surrounding Natasha's untimely death were strange, and is still a mystery. Her drowning remains an L.A. County cold case.
And you probably haven't heard Natasha Zacharenko's name and may even suspect that she wasn't even a star at all.
Don’t remember Natasha’s work on the silver screen? Or that of her sister, Svetlana Gurdin? The family surname had been “Americanized” by the time Svetlana was born in 1946.
She did indeed give her heart to the “high school rebel,” a tale recounted in Shenandoah's hit song that reached #3 on the Hot Country chart in January 1994.
More than a decade before her turn opposite James Dean, studio executives at RKO Radio Pictures, provided young Natasha—when she began acting at the age of five—with an even more American surname, the stage name of “Wood.”
Svetlana was also a child star and took on the last name, too. The studio excised the first syllable from her given name and she became “Lana.”
The Russian name Natasha was also massaged … into the American, “Natalie.”
The late Natalie Wood.
Born on this day, 86 years ago. July 20, 1938 in San Francisco, California.
As always,
Brian
P.S. — Had The Searchers — the aforementioned 1956 movie in which Wood played opposite John Wayne — not been such a cultural phenomenon and if The Duke never uttered his iconic line, rock 'n' roll music would never be the same.
For instance, we'd probably never would have heard of The Beatles …
