Inside Natalie Wood

For the second time in three years, director Peter Bogdanovich casts a glance at a Hollywood life that ended in a mysterious death. The Cat's Meow--which was released in 2002 and starred Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies, Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin and Jennifer Tilly as Louella Parsons--followed the line of persistent rumors of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst's guilt in director Thomas Ince's death and an ensuing cover-up. The Mystery of Natalie Wood takes a much broader view of its iconic subject, but the whole movie can't help but be colored by our inescapable knowledge of her untimely death by drowning off Catalina Island in 1981.

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British actress Justine Waddell was chosen by Bogdanovich to play the lead in the film, scheduled to air March 1 on ABC, with Michael Weatherly as Robert Wagner and Matthew Settle as Warren Beatty. Born in South Africa and a graduate of Cambridge, Waddell--who has starred in theater productions of Chekhov's Ivanov (opposite Ralph Fiennes) and The Seagull, and played the leads in the popular British miniseries Wives and Daughters, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Great Expectations --flew to the States on her own dime to audition for the role of Wood and landed the part. Her performance covers Wood's life from 16 to 42--no ordinary feat.

We asked Peter Bogdanovich to interview his star for Hollywood Life, but instead got a lively, informal conversation where two voices interweave like an engaging impromptu duet--a poignant reminiscence about the three-time Academy Award-nominated (but never Oscar-winning) star and the making of a film that both captures the essence of Wood's life and depicts a Hollywood that Bogdanovich knows only too well.

PETER BOGDANOVICH: What was like it for you playing a film icon? Terrifying?

JUSTINE WADDELL: Terrifying. But also exciting, because we very much moved away from dealing with Natalie as an icon and were dealing with her primarily as an actress and a woman. I mean, we went behind the films so that you know what Natalie feels like when they get Marni Nixon to dub her singing voice in West Side Story, or why she didn't want to go to the premiere of Rebel without a Cause after James Dean died, or why she wanted to do Splendor in the Grass with Elia Kazan. In terms of playing an icon, it was very much about how her work related to her life. So we kind of quietly sidestepped that--didn't we, Peter?--in an interesting way.

PB: It's sort of there, but it's not spelled out. What we were trying to do was to get some sense of what she was like--what her life was like and what contributed to the enormous sensitivity of her performances.

JW: What was your favorite Natalie movie?

PB: I think Splendor in the Grass--and Love with the Proper Stranger.

JW: My favorite is Love with the Proper Stranger. Although as a non-American, I just adore West Side Story.

PB: Yeah, and she was wonderful in Inside Daisy Clover and in This Property Is Condemned. I don't think she gave a bad performance.

JW: Did you ever meet her?

PB: Maybe three, four times. All at public gatherings, so I couldn't speak to her. Once was at a screening of a Cary Grant movie; she was with Warren Beatty. I don't think much more happened than I said hello, Warren said hello, and that was about it. And then I saw her I think twice more at parties, in '62 and then in the 70s when she was back with Robert Wagner. He was very kind of ebullient and she was sort of quiet and a little bit suspicious. So I couldn't say I had any real experience with her.

JW: You very much brought a sense of what Hollywood could have been like at that time and what the pressures on a young woman like Natalie were when she was making her most major films. It's all very humorous, but I mean, there is a real sense of this kind of glorious life. I mean, she really lived her life in the limelight.

PB: Oh God, yes. Natalie had to deal with fame at a very young age. She didn't really have a life; from the time she was 4 or 5 she was in the movies.

JW: A strange reality.

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