I want to be loved like that
"One boy fighting for one girl"
At age 9, she stole the hearts of movie-goers in a Christmas classic.
At 16, this “beauty queen” gave her own heart to a “high school rebel.”
During her childhood, I recently discovered that she spent summers near Healdsburg, California, not far from the family home in Santa Rosa, regularly swimming in the waters of the Russian River with pals, including a family friend of ours.
Though, not related to the Russian traders who once colonized that part of California, Natasha Zacharenko was indeed of Russian extraction. Her mother was born in southern Siberia, becoming a refugee in the Chinese city of Harbin after the advent of the Russian Civil War and eventually emigrating to America.
Natasha’s father was originally from the settlement of Nikolskoye in far eastern Russia, located less than 40 miles from both the Sino-Russian border and the Pacific Ocean. His family fled to Shanghai after the fighting began—and which claimed the life of at least one family member. From Shanghai, they made it to Vancouver, British Columbia and then on to America.
Natasha’s family ended up moving south to the Los Angeles area and she graduated from Van Nuys High School in the San Fernando Valley in 1956.
She rocketed to success as a young “ingénue” well before she was even out of high school.
By the age of 25, she became the youngest person to be nominated for three Oscars. Jennifer Lawrence would eclipse this achievement in 2013 at the age of 23.
In her early 30s, Natasha bore her first child, also named Natasha, and went into semi-retirement, only ever acting in four more films.
Meanwhile, her sister picked up the slack for the family and was making waves in Hollywood as a “Bond Girl,” starring opposite Sean Connery in the Scotsman’s sixth turn as 007.
Years after Natasha’s tragic drowning death off the coast of Santa Catalina Island, Svetlana claimed that her sister could not swim and had been “terrified” of water.
Did she regularly frolic in the healing waters of the Russian River after all? I think so, based on my sources.
But the circumstances surrounding the untimely death were more than strange, and the mystery is something way above my pay grade to figure out. Still a cold case in L.A. County as far as I’m aware.
And many won’t believe that Natasha Zacharenko was even a star at all because you’ve probably never heard that name.
Don’t remember Natasha’s work on the silver screen? Or that of her sister, Svetlana Gurdin? (The family had changed its name from Zacharenko by the time Svetlana was born in 1946.)
It certainly was indeed that selfsame teenager that gave her heart to the “high school rebel,” part of a tale recounted in a hit song that reached #3 on the Hot Country chart in January 1994.
Many years before, studio executives at RKO Radio Pictures, provided young Natasha—after she had begun acting at the age of five—with the stage surname “Wood.”
Young Svetlana was a child star also and took the last name as well. They excised her first syllable and she became “Lana.”
The name Natasha was also massaged…into the American, “Natalie.”
The late Natalie Wood. Born on this day, 84 years ago. July 20, 1938 in San Francisco, California.
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Brian O’Leary