Natalie Wood — actress with roots in the Russian Empire
Natalie Wood was born in San Francisco on 20 July 1938, the daughter of two emigrants from Siberia and the Russian Far East. Her birth certificate gives her name simply as Natalie Zacharenko; the Russian form Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko is the one usually cited. She was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church and grew up speaking Russian.
Her mother, Maria Zoudilova, came from Barnaul. Maria's father owned soap and candle factories and an estate outside the city; during the Civil War the family left Russia for China and settled in Harbin. Maria's first marriage, to Alexander Tatuloff, produced a daughter, Olga, and the couple reached America by ship in 1930. The earliest records give Maria's birth year as 1908; she later gave it as 1912.
Her father, Nicholas Zacharenko, was a carpenter from Ussuriysk. His own father, a chocolate-factory worker who had joined anti-Bolshevik civilian forces, was killed in street fighting between Red and White troops in Vladivostok. The widow and her three sons went to Shanghai, moved to Vancouver in 1927 and were in the United States by 1933. Nicholas and Maria married in February 1938, and a year after Natalie's birth he changed the family name to Gurdin. Her only full sibling, Svetlana, born in Santa Monica in 1946, became the actress Lana Wood.
She first appeared on screen at four, in The Moon Is Down (1943), and RKO executives later gave her the surname Wood, after the director Sam Wood. At eight she played the sceptical child in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and at sixteen she was nominated for the Academy Award for Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) brought two Best Actress nominations; at twenty-five she shared with Teresa Wright the record as the youngest performer to reach three, a record since broken. She also starred in West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962).
Her Russian was used on screen. In The Great Race (1965) it accounted for a character who reports on a race across Siberia, and in Meteor (1979) she spoke it fluently. The same year she won a Golden Globe for the television remake of From Here to Eternity.
She drowned off Santa Catalina Island on 29 November 1981, aged forty-three, while making Brainstorm. In 2012 the Los Angeles County coroner amended the cause of death to drowning and other undetermined factors.
"Mother's family left Barnaul for Harbin during the Civil War, reaching America in 1930; father's family went from Vladivostok to Shanghai, Vancouver (1927) and the US (by 1933)."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Barnaul (mother) and Ussuriysk (father), Russia
Born in San Francisco in 1938 to emigrants from Russia: her mother, Maria Zoudilova, came from Barnaul by way of Harbin; her father, Nicholas Zacharenko, a carpenter, from Ussuriysk by way of Shanghai and Vancouver. She was raised Russian Orthodox and spoke Russian, which she used on screen.
Mother Maria Zoudilova from Barnaul; her father owned soap and candle factories and an estate outside the city. Father Nicholas Zacharenko, a carpenter, from Ussuriysk; his father was killed in street fighting in Vladivostok during the Civil War.
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Barnaul (mother) and Ussuriysk (father), Russia. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.