Natalie Wood was a transitional celebrity, with a career that spanned Hollywood’s difficult transition from the studio system to the independent free-for-all that still exists today.

Wood was a child star, Oscar nominee, teen bride, and has-been all before the age of twenty, and her face appears stuck in the shift from girl to woman. Her performances were praised and mocked in equal measure because they alternated between emotional and hysterical.

However, she had a strong work ethic and eventually overcame studio manipulation to become a legend in her own right, appearing in one of the most popular and seminal musicals of the last fifty years.

With parts in classic films such as Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, the actress sealed her place in film history and made tabloid headlines with her numerous high-profile romances and dazzling appearances.

But her seemingly glamorous existence in the spotlight was actually littered with sorrow. Wood survived some of the worst conditions life could throw at her in the shadows of her public climb to prominence, only to drown inexplicably at the age of 43 in an unresolved event.

INTERFOTO/ALAMY

From domestic violence. From family violence. Alcoholic father. Pathological attachment to her Svengali stage mother. Psychological abuse as a child star. Paranoia. Phobias. Bedroom of storybook dolls she believed were alive and spoke to her. Pimped at 15 to Frank Sinatra. Forced to return an engagement ring to her high school sweetheart, who tried to kill himself afterward to being exploited as a teenager into a sexual liaison with 42-year-old director Nicholas Ray to prove that she could play a “bad” girl in Rebel Without a Cause.

Filming alongside James Dean for the landmark picture, her performance would give Wood her first Oscar nomination and represent a successful transition in her career from child actor to teen star. However, the exploitative methods that Hollywood is known for played a part in her landing that position.

When Wood auditioned for Nicholas Ray, the film’s 42-year-old director, she was 16 years old. According to biographer Suzanne Finstad, writing for Vanity Fair, Ray and the underage Wood thereafter had a “sexual liaison.” Despite the illegal relationship (California’s age of consent has been 18 since at least 1920, according to YR Media), it seemed that Wood was still not promised the part of Judy.

According to an unconfirmed source, Wood was not only sleeping with Ray but also with her other costar, Dennis Hopper, causing all kinds of dramz on set with the near-men and dad-aged guys.

In a 1974 interview, Wood claimed that she got in a car accident after a wild night out with Hopper, and Ray came to the hospital, where the doctor labelled Wood a “goddamn juvenile delinquent.” She yelled: “Did you hear what he called me, Nick? He called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent! Now do I get the part?”

Whether or not this succeeded, Ray sent Warner Bros. a memo that read, “We just spent three days testing 32 kids. There is only one girl who has shown the capacity to play Judy, and she is Natalie Wood.”

Wood was nominated for an Academy Award for playing someone she was, not someone she wasn’t—much like so many children and teenagers are nominated (and win) for playing characters who are children, rather than children’s bodies mouthing adult words.