Natalie Wood

Here is a classic song from "West Side Story", performed by the beautiful and very fine jazz singer Marilyn Burroughs (who was the wife of Clark Burroughs, a founding member and the lead singer for the famous band The Hi Lo's from 1953 to 1992. He formed for a short time a folk-rock duo with his wife and produced her LP "I Feel Pretty" from which comes the song presented here), chosen to illustrate the beauty of Natalie Wood, who starred in that movie.
Natalie Wood (1938 -- 1981) was a three time Academy Award nominated American film actress. Born Natalya Nikolaevna Zakharenko in San Francisco, California, to Russian immigrants, her parents changed their surname to "Gurdin", and by the age of 4 she was billed as Natasha Gurdin. She starred in multiple films as a child including "Miracle on 34th Street" in 1947. At 16, Natalie was awarded the role of Judy in Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without a Cause", co-starring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Dennis Hopper, signalling the start of her adult acting career. Wood was one of the relatively few child stars to make a successful transition to adult stardom. By the time she was 28, she was already a three-time Oscar nominee, with nominations for "Rebel Without a Cause", "Splendor in the Grass" and "Love With the Proper Stranger". Another of her widely noted films was the Leonard Bernstein musical "West Side Story", in which she played Maria. She enjoyed worldwide celebrity, comparable to that of Elizabeth Taylor. As a restless on-screen companion of James Dean and an off-screen date of Elvis Presley, she was much admired and envied by the young girls of the day. She was married to Robert Wagner. In 1981, at the age of forty-three, Wood drowned while their yacht The Splendor was anchored at Catalina Island.