Died at 87
female
Natalie Wood (née Zacharenko; July 20, 1938 – November 29, 1981) was an American actress who began her career in film as a child and successfully transitioned to young adult roles. Wood started acting at age four and was given a co-starring role at age 8 in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). As a teenager, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), followed by a role in John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Wood starred in the musical films West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962) and received nominations for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963). Her career continued with films such as Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). During the 1970s, Wood began a hiatus from film and had two daughters: one with her second husband Richard Gregson, and one with Robert Wagner, her first husband whom she married again after divorcing Gregson. She acted in only two feature films throughout the decade, but she appeared slightly more often in television productions, including a remake of From Here to Eternity (1979) for which she won a Golden Globe Award. Wood's films represented a "coming of age" for her and for Hollywood films in general. Critics have suggested that her cinematic career represents a portrait of modern American womanhood in transition, as she was one of the few to take both child roles and those of middle-aged characters. Wood died off the coast of Santa Catalina Island on November 29, 1981, at age 43, during a holiday break from the production of her would-be comeback film Brainstorm (1983) with Christopher Walken. The events surrounding her death have been the subject of conflicting witness statements, prompting the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, under the instruction of the coroner's office, to list her cause of death as "drowning and other undetermined factors" in 2012. Description above from the Wikipedia article Natalie Wood, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Natalie Wood
Liesl Von Trapp
for Liesl Von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1955)
Suggested by teeyutes
In 1930s Austria, a young woman named Maria is failing miserably in her attempts to become a nun. When Navy Captain Georg Von Trapp writes to the abbey asking for a governess that can handle his seven mischievous children, Maria is given the job. His wife is dead, he is often away, and he runs the household as strictly as he did the ships on which he sailed in his glory days. The children are unhappy and resentful of the governesses their father keeps hiring and have managed to run each of them off one by one. When Maria arrives, she is initially met with the same hostility, but her kindness, understanding, and sense of fun soon draws the children to her and brings some much-needed joy into all their lives, and eventually, even the Captain is touched by her. Eventually he and Maria find themselves falling in love, even though he is already engaged to a Baroness named Elsa and Maria is still a postulant. The romance makes them both start questioning the decisions they have made. However, their personal conflicts soon become overshadowed by current events. Austria is about to be seized by Nazi Germany, and the Captain may soon find himself drafted into the German Navy and forced to fight against his own country. —Paraphrased from LOTUS73 on IMDb
