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“I didn't like children. I didn't think of myself as a child. I didn't like any of the things other children were interested in.” —Natalie Wood, gone from the world on this day in 1981, at only forty-three. She appears here in a radiant promotional still for The Great Race (1965, Warner Bros.), a vision of mid-century glamour caught at its zenith. In this photograph she seems to distil the essence of her screen presence: that miraculous fusion of sparkle and stillness, vivacity tempered by something inward and ineffably sad.
Few stars ever carried such light within such fragility. Her smile illuminates the frame, yet behind it flickers the shadow of introspection, the faint ache that made her beauty so indelible. Not all of her films were winners (see Penelope, as wretched a film as I've ever seen), but in all she was both muse and mystery—a woman whose brightness could fill a cinema, and whose silence could linger long after the film had ended.
Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.
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