cover image Natalie Wood

Natalie Wood

Christopher Nickens. Doubleday Books, $15.95 (202pp) ISBN 978-0-385-23307-1

Although fans might remember Natalie Wood as beautiful, talented and tragic, the film star emerges in this adulatory, superficial biography as merely boring. Nickens (who has also assembled ""biographies in photographs'' of Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor) presents an entire cast of characters that is decidedly flat. One doesn't expect an in-depth psychological study from a photo album, but the lack of insight here into the actress's relationships with her pushy stage mother, Maria, her sister Lana, and Robert Wagner, the husband she divorced and remarried, is conspicuous. The text is little more than captions accompanying a portfolio of Wood's career from her first bit part at the age of five in 1943 through Brainstorm, which was interrupted by her death in 1981. This sugar-coated trip down memory lane will make readers long for some good, titillating trash. (May 2)