(CNN) -- Natalie Wood was terrified of the water.





As an 11-year-old shooting "The Green Promise," she was thrown off a bridge during a storm scene and nearly drowned. The incident scarred her for life.





Thirty-two years later, Wood died after falling into the ocean off Catalina Island in California.





Wood's life is full of such curiosities. She was that rare child performer to make the transition to adult movie star, but her rise to success was marked by troubled relationships. She had beauty and talent, but she suffered from alcohol abuse and once tried to commit suicide.





And then there's her death, coming just as she was restarting her movie career.





Wood, who died in 1981, is back in the news after police reopened the case involving her drowning at age 43.





Police: Robert Wagner not a suspect in new probe of Natalie Wood's death





The story surrounding Wood's death has long been one of Hollywood's great mysteries. She was making a motion picture comeback in a highly touted science-fiction film, "Brainstorm," and was on her yacht with her husband, Robert Wagner, and her co-star, Christopher Walken.





Aspects of Wood's life have only heightened the speculation. How could someone so young, with a good marriage and revitalized career, die just like that?





Captain describes Wood cover-up story





Wood had been a top star for decades, both a box office draw and Oscar-nominated actress. Among her films were some of the biggest and most influential of the 1950s and '60s, including "Rebel Without a Cause," "West Side Story" and "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice."





"It was as if she had movie star stamped on her birth certificate," Wagner once said.





Indeed, she seemed fated for stardom from the beginning.





Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, daughter of Russian immigrants, in San Francisco in 1938. The family later changed their last name to Gurdin.





At age 4, she had a bit part in 1943's "Happy Land" after a production company spotted her in nearby Santa Rosa. Her mother, intent on her daughter making it in the movie business, moved the family to Los Angeles, and young Natalia, renamed Natalie Wood by the studio, soon earned a role in the 1946 Orson Welles film "Tomorrow Is Forever."





Welles was impressed with the scene-stealing youngster. "She's terrifying!" he's said to have described her. (Wood's sister, Lana, also did well, later playing Plenty O'Toole in the James Bond film "Diamonds Are Forever.")





From the late '40s until the mid-'50s, she was one of the most active child performers in the movie business, appearing in such films as 1947's "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" and 1950's "Never a Dull Moment." But for several years she was best known as the Santa Claus-believing child in 1947's "Miracle on 34th Street," opposite Maureen O'Hara and Edmund Gwenn.





She later looked back at her childhood years with pain and a little fury.





"I spent practically all my time in the company of adults. I was very withdrawn, very shy, I did what I was told and I tried not to disappoint anybody. I knew I had a duty to perform, and I was trained to follow orders," she once said. Her relationship with her mother was often bitter.





Glamour to spare





It wasn't until the groundbreaking "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), also starring James Dean and Sal Mineo, that she broke through into mature roles. The film featured Wood as the girlfriend of Dean's angst-ridden Jim Stark in the role that made Dean a generational symbol. Wood was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her performance.





But it was two 1961 films, the film version of the Broadway smash "West Side Story" and the romantic tragedy "Splendor in the Grass," that
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