Natalie Wood is well known for her Hollywood films, but one of her most notable roles is that of Wilma Dean Loomis in the 1961 production “Splendor in the Grass.” The film challenged the entertainment world with its sexually charged dialogue, putting Wood on the map. In the film she plays a teenager who is struggling with her sexuality and the protectiveness of her parents.
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Here are what critics had to say about Wood’s performance in this iconic role.
1. “Miss Wood has a beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film,”
wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times.
2. “It was Natalie Wood who rightfully earned the Academy Award nomination for, as much as anything, whining like a cat in heat and moaning in a steaming hot bathtub while her unbroken hymen vibrates like a tuning fork,”
wrote Eric Henderson for Slant Magazine.
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3. “Wood is a revelation as Deanie, desperately trying to repress raging sexual desire, conflicted between raw attraction for Bud and all the stop signs planted in her path by her icy cold mother. Her plight is an astonishing reminder that until early in the 20th century, female hysteria was a common diagnosis for women suffering through sexual dissatisfaction, and she emerges from her ordeal a tightly wired cage of suppression, a tense smile working overtime to beat down the rage against life's careless destruction of her love. Deanie reignited Wood's career, and she received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Actress,”
said Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews.
4. “So much has been written about Wood as a bad actress that it’s startling to remember how touching she could be. You’d have to be very hardhearted not to be affected at least a little by the scene in which she breaks down in her English class while reading Wordsworth. There’s another reason her performance works: She really does look like the prettiest girl in school,”
wrote Charles Taylor for Salon.com
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