Natalie Wood: Photos of the Star and Hollywood Powerhouse, 1963

Written By: Ben Cosgrove

Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko in San Francisco at the height of the Great Depression, Natalie Wood (“Natasha” to close friends) was one of those rare stars who combined old-school glamor, powerhouse talent and smoldering sex appeal. Her death by drowning off the California coast when she was just 43 remains one of Hollywood’s enduring mysteries, and the source of unending rumors, investigations and speculation.

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