From her starring role as a skeptical child in the perennial classic Miracle on 34th Street, to her troubled adolescence in Rebel Without A Cause to her tragic maturity in Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story, actress Natalie Wood transfixed the world with her hypnotic brown eyes. Yet behind the beautiful facade lurked a fragile, sparkling, generous, funny woman traumatized by her childhood and beset by personal demons. In this landmark biography, her close personal friend Gavin Lambert sets out to tell her extraordinary story with the help of intimate interviews from her friends and colleagues including Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and her husband Robert Wagner. What emerges is a luminous, assiduously researched portrait that sheds new light on the life and tragic death of the silver screen's most beguiling star.

Gavin Lambert was born and educated in England. He is the author of four biographies and seven novels, including Inside Daisy Clover, and The Goodbye People. His screenplays include The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone starring Warren Beatty and Vivien Leigh, Inside Daisy Clover starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood, the Oscar-nominated Sons and Lovers, and I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. Lambert lived in Tangier from 1974 to 1988, and presently lives in Los Angeles.