Natalie Wood and her silver poodle Morningstar, at home in Beverly Hills in 1960.

Photo by Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

Gertrude Stein, right, and Alice B. Toklas walked their poodle, Baskets, in the French village of Culoz after the end of German occupation, 1945.

Photo by Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

Baseball star Willie Mays walked with his poodle at the San Francisco airport, after his Giants left New York and moved west in 1958.

Photo by Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

In 1956, Jayne Mansfield pondered the eternal question: why not just play with your dog?

Photo by Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

Alfred Hitchcock, at home with his Sealyham terrier Mr. Jenkins in 1939, offered a title for this photo: “A Dislike of American Fireplaces.”

Photo by Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.

Steve McQueen was woken by his malamute during a hunting trip in the Sierra Madre Mountains, 1963.

Photo by John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Frank Sinatra checked in on Ringo in Palm Springs, 1965.

Photo by John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Jimmy Stewart once read a poem about his dog on The Tonight Show.

Photo by Rex Hardy/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Actress Bette Davis and her dog were wheeled about in her Beverly Hills backyard, 1939.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

On this journey on a less-traveled road, poet Robert Frost chose not to walk alone.

Photo by Eric Schaal/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

The post Celebrities’ Best Friends appeared first on LIFE.

Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs made by Bill Ray in 1963 a time in the 25-year-old Wood’s career when she had made the leap from actress to genuine movie star and, more importantly, to formidable Hollywood player. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE, but appear in Ray’s book, My Life in Photography. 

For Ray, the most striking memory of the several weeks that he spent with Wood and her showbiz cohorts is, unsurprisingly, Wood herself or, more specifically, her singular beauty.

“She was divine,” Ray told LIFE.com. “Really. She was divine to look at, and to photograph. She had that wonderful face, a great body, those amazing eyes just a beautiful young woman, and a lot of fun to be around.”

For the Dec. 20, 1963, issue of LIFE that focused wholly on the movies, Ray scored the choice, high-profile feature on Wood, which was the only piece in the issue that was devoted to a single actor or actress. “This was big stuff,” he says today of the assignment. “You know, back then photographers were never part of the meetings where these sort of assignment decisions were made, so to get the call for something of this magnitude I was thrilled.”

Thrilled, but hardly cowed or overawed. After all, by the time the Natalie Wood shoot came his way, Ray was a seasoned professional, having covered JFK, Elvis Presley, John Wayne and other huge names and famous faces. What comes through in many of his photographs is the sense that here was a photographer who genuinely enjoyed his work, while his subject was a strong young woman who had been in the public eye for so long that having her every move documented was hardly anything new.

As LIFE reminded its readers in that special year-end double issue back in 1963, Natalie Wood was about as self-aware and self-confident an actress as one was likely to meet:

Natalie Wood was in a crowd watching a movie being filmed 21 years ago when the director asked her do a bit: drop an ice cream cone and cry. Then and there, 4-year-old Natalie showed she was born to be a star: she wept so convincingly that the movies hired her and ever since they have been thankful for the foresight. . . . [Movies] still cannot get along without the glamor that stars bring. And Natalie, the biggest young star around, now holds Hollywood in her hand. Her latest performance in her 35th film, ‘Love With a Proper Stranger,’ may win her an Oscar. [She did earn an Academy Award nomination for the role, but Patricia Neal took home the Oscar for her work in ‘Hud.’] Natalie has talent which she uses brilliantly, temperament which she can control, and a dark fresh loveliness that glows from the screen. All this earns her a million dollars a year, along with something that means even more to her the power and the glory that stardom brings.

“Natalie Wood,” observed a prominent Hollywood director, … “has a stranglehold on every young leading-lady part in town. If a role calls for a woman between 15 and 30, you automatically think of her.”

This is exactly what Natalie has worked 21 years to get. She has battled producers and top studio heads with unyielding ferocity to win the roles she wants. Today, before she will do a picture, she demands and gets total approval of script, director, leading man, all actors, everybody clear down to make-up and wardrobe people.

One last detail that Bill Ray recalls about his time with Natalie Wood, however, casts something of a pall across his otherwise sunny memories. At some point during those several weeks, he joined Wood and a number of other people on a boat ride to Catalina Island (see slide 16 in the gallery) the same island off the California coast near which Wood would drown in the fall of 1981. When Ray heard about her death, he was stunned: not only because he had always liked her and remembered the time he spent with her with such fondness, but because he had been struck during that boat ride in 1963 by how uncharacteristically out of sorts she seemed.

“It was obvious to me,” Ray told LIFE.com, “that Natalie did not like being out on the water at all. When I heard that she’d drowned, in basically the same place where we’d been all those years before, I wasn’t just sad although that was part of it. I was also very, very surprised.”

Five decades later, the mystery of Natalie Wood’s death endures. Bill Ray’s pictures, meanwhile, shed a clear, poignant light on a time when the star’s already impressive career felt boundless, and her life charmed. The future, it seemed then, was hers for the taking.

—story by Ben Cosgrove 

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood was playing a game. Friends named something, she acted it out. Here is ‘slightly sensuous.'”

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The woman who guided Natalie to stardom was her mother, the Russian-born Mrs. Maria Gurdin (center). Stern and shrewd, she scrutinized scripts, haggled over fees, snd dressed her child in prim clothes when competitors wore sexy ones.

© Bill Ray

Wood played billiards with actor Tony Curtis, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood got a piggyback ride from producer Arthur Loew, Jr., who stopped when Paul Newman invited them to go go-cart racing, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Gowned in satin, bathed by spots, fussed over by attendants, Wood glowed with the glamor pf a Hollywood star.

© Bill Ray

Wood, a shrewd businesswoman, enjoyed presiding over her high-powered cabinet.

© Bill Ray

Wood’s big brown-black eyes grew larger with delight seeing costumes sketched by Edith Head for `Sex and the Single Girl’.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The post Natalie Wood: Portraits of a Legend appeared first on LIFE.

But not every picture from those many rolls of film could make it to print. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of the best photos of the late, radiant star which were not originally published in LIFE magazine.

Natalie Wood died, far too young, in 1981. She was just 43 years old. She drowned near Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California. In 2012, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner reclassified the cause of her death as “drowning and other undetermined factors.”

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen, 1963.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood in 1945; at age eight she appeared in Miracle on 34th Street.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood swung upside down in her backyard as a child, 1945.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood practiced as her 16-year-old sister Olga plays a Chopin waltz, 1945.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natasha Wood drew a girl’s face on her blackboard.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Woods watered the lawn as her mother, Maria Gurdin, supervised, 1945.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood sat poolside with a poodle in 1956.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood, Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams made dinner in 1965.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood read aloud from Thomas Wolfe’s The Hills Beyond for friends Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams in 1956.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood in character with Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams, 1956.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood (with Nick Adams and a partly hidden Dennis Hopper above), 1956.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood took a call while sitting on her bed at home in 1965.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood with actor friends in Los Angeles in 1965.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Twenty-two-year-old Natalie Wood, 1960, at the Beverly Hills home she shared with husband Robert Wagner.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty posed for a portrait for their movie Splendor in the Grass.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, 1961.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood readied for the Academy Awards in April 1962.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Woods readied for the Academy Awards, April 1962.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Woods readied for the Academy Awards, April 1962.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood received the final touches on her updo with hair spray before the Academy Awards in April 1962.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An assistant helped Natalie Wood into her dress in April 1962.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood smiled beside her date for the 1962 Oscars, Warren Beatty.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen, 1963.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood smoked with Steve McQueen in 1963.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen in 1963.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Natalie Wood: Rare and Classic Photos of the Lifelong Movie Star appeared first on LIFE.

“I threw myself, one hundred percent, into every shoot,” Ray said. “And I loved it.”

For this Photographer Spotlight, however, LIFE.com focussed on one aspect of Ray’s varied portfolio: celebrity portraits.

Even a partial roll call of the stars Bill Ray photographed for LIFE reads like a Who’s Who of Sixties pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Sinatra, the Beatles, Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis, Steve McQueen, Jackie Kennedy and on and on and on. What’s truly remarkable is that he managed to capture something utterly distinctive about each one.

It’s difficult to imagine one photographer capable of showing us something elemental about personalities as wildly disparate as, say, Brigitte Bardot, Sonny Liston and Woody Allen, but Bill Ray did just that, again and again.

Some photo captions in this gallery include Ray’s memories of what it was like to photograph these people. But we’ve also included, below, a few of the longer and often hilarious stories Bill Ray told about documenting the lives and careers of the 20th century’s most famous public figures.

[Buy Bill Ray’s My LIFE in Photography, from which some of these memories, slightly edited, are taken.]

Marilyn Monroe Sings “Happy Birthday” to JFK, May 19, 1962:

I was on assignment for LIFE at the old Madison Square Garden that night one of many photographers down in front of the stage. The police, with directions from the Secret Service, were forcing the press into a tight group behind a rope. I knew that all the “rope-a-dopes” would get the same shot, and that would not work for LIFE. I squeezed between the cops and took off looking for a better place.

It seemed that I climbed forever. When I found a pipe railing to rest the lens on (exposure was strictly by guess), I could see JFK through the telephoto. When the moment came, the Garden went black. Total silence.

One spotlight snapped on, and there was Marilyn, in that dress, crystals sparkling and flashing. She was smiling, with everyone on the edge of their seats. Then, in her breathy, sexy, unique voice, looking the entire time right at JFK, she sang.

In two-and-a-half months, Marilyn would be dead. In eighteen months, Kennedy would be assassinated; Vietnam would turn into our worst nightmare; Camelot would be gone. But that night, Marilyn’s brief song stopped the world.

 

Brigitte Bardot Throws a Tantrum on the Set of Shalako, Spain, 1968:

I rode with Bardot to the set many times in her white Rolls-Royce. On one of those mornings, B.B. saw a stray, starving dog and ordered her driver to stop. It was love at first sight. The starving mutt loved B.B. and the Rolls, and B.B. loved the mutt. B.B. put all her retainers on the case. She would make a perfect life for this “adorable” dog.

Her hairdresser bathed the dog. Her chauffeur tore off in the Rolls for filet mignon. The dog never left her side until the fourth day when he keeled over dead from too much of the good life.

B.B. started to cry and worked herself up to uncontrollable wailing. She locked her dressing room door. Cast and crew [including co-star Sean Connery] were standing by. Lunch time came and went. The wailing went on and on. The whole day was lost; mucho dinero.

 

Woody Allen in Vegas, 1966:

It was a pivotal year for Woody. He published stories in the New Yorker, wrote and directed his first film, What’s Up Tiger Lily? and had a Broadway hit, Don’t Drink the Water. He was on fire, and LIFE wanted to celebrate him with a cover story. I was given the job of shooting Woody in Las Vegas, along with any other photos I could get of his other activities.

The Woody I met at Caesars Palace was one of the quietest, most cooperative people I’ve ever worked with. The only problem was that he didn’t do anything except stay in his room, write, and practice his clarinet until it was time for his standup routine. Then I remembered the kitschy nude Roman statues in front of Caesars. With trepidation, I asked Woody if he would pose with one of the nudes. He thought it was a funny idea and said “sure.” That was a relief and I pressed my luck, asking him if he would wear a red sweater that I happened to have with me.

“Is it cashmere?” he asked. It wasn’t; it was wool.

Woody said he was allergic to wool, but after some pleading, he agreed to wear it.

I needed the contrast with the white statue, and a bit of red never hurt for a cover shoot. The statue seemed to inspire Woody, and he really came to life. He hugged and vamped and swung around. It was tremendous fun.

Phone calls and telexes from New York assured me the shots were great and would run with the story.

But LIFE was a weekly and would use a news cover whenever they could. Unfortunately for me, some damn thing happened that week and LIFE scrapped the Woody Allen cover. It was heartbreaking but I still had the great thrill of working with one on the comic geniuses of my time.

Pvt. Elvis Presley in Brooklyn, 1958, before leaving the States to serve in Germany.

Bill RayThe LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Gina Lollobrigida signed autographs in front of New York’s old Metropolitan Opera House, 1958.

Bill Ray

Frank Sinatra on the set of the movie, “Can-Can,” 1959.

Bill Ray

Elizabeth Taylor 1959

Bill Ray

John Wayne, Toots Shor, 1959

Bill Ray

Jackie Kennedy 1960

Bill Ray

Ella Fitzgerald 1962

Bill Ray

Marilyn Monroe 1962

Bill Ray

Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, 1963

Bill Ray

Natalie Wood 1963

Bill Ray

Jill St. John 1963

Bill Ray

Marlon Brando and Paul Newman 1963

Bill Ray

Senta Berger 1964

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Beatles 1964

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Woody Allen 1966

Bill Ray

Michael Caine 1966

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ray Charles performed at Carnegie Hall, 1966.

Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Nancy Sinatra 1966

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen 1967

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lew Alcindor 1967

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Brigitte Bardot 1968

Bill Ray

Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski 1968

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Jane Fonda and daughter 1971

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

George Harrison and Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangladesh in New York, 1971.

Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Ann Margaret 1972

Bill Ray

Diahann Carroll and David Frost

Bill Ray Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Photographer Spotlight: Bill Ray’s Classic Celebrity Portraits appeared first on LIFE.