In ‘Little sister’ he tells the details of an attack that had been rumored for years
The life of Natalie Wood It might as well have been written by a Hollywood screenwriter. Drugs, alcohol, double marriage with Robert Wagner, extramarital affair with Christopher Walken and a mysterious death aboard a luxury yacht in which both husband and lover were traveling.
If this reality is already more than fiction, the memoirs published by his sister Lana Wood confirm a rumor that ran through the spheres of American cinema for decades: that the actress from Splendor in the grass she was raped by a powerful interpreter much older than her when she came to meet him at the hotel Chateau Marmont of the Angels.
The memories, called Little sister: my investigation into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood, they point directly to Kirk Douglas for the aggression and it is not the first time that his name comes up in the case. The rumors began to skyrocket in 2020, after the death of the actor at 103 years old and after Lana’s statements in a podcast in which she narrated that a movie star had abused her privileged position to take advantage of the actress. It had already been mentioned in 2001, when the writer Suzanne Finstad published the biography Natasha.
The drowning death of the actress on a luxury yacht remains a mystery
The events occurred in the summer of 1955 when the actress was 16 years old and was filming the film The searchers, after having participated with his sister in Desert centaurs. His mother, Maria Zakharenko, he scheduled that meeting between Douglas and Wood so that “many doors were opened to him with a single gesture of his famous and beautiful head in his name,” writes Lana.
“I remember Natalie looking especially beautiful when Mom and I dropped her off that night at the entrance to the Chateau Marmont.” However, the young woman took too long to return and when she got home she knew that something had gone wrong. “It looked horrible. She was very disheveled and upset. She and Mom started whispering urgently to each other. He couldn’t really hear them or understand what they were saying. Apparently something bad had happened to my sister, but whatever it was, apparently I was too young to be told, ”recalls Lana, who was 8 years old at the time.
Her mother’s advice was to “endure”, prioritizing her daughter’s career over her well-being. Although Lana promised her sister while she was alive that she would never reveal anything related to the assault, the rumors have become so palpable that she has decided to do justice after so many years. “It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified, I was confused, “she says.
If true, they would thus invalidate the memories of Kirk Douglas about this first meeting between the two. The Spartacus actor published his autobiography in 1988 in which he remembered the actress as “a pretty girl in a suede jacket who jumped at him.” At the moment, the interpreter’s family has not commented on the matter.
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