Natalie Wood’s Daughter to Make Documentary Homage to Her Mother

Two months after a sensational podcast revisited the strange circumstances of Natalie Wood’s 1981 death, the actress’s daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner, is hoping to turn attention back to Wood’s life and Oscar-nominated career with a new documentary.

The film, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, will include previously unseen home movies, photographs, diaries, letters, and artifacts that belonged to the late actress, as well as new interviews with Wood’s friends and family members—and will focus more on Wood’s career and personal life than her still-mysterious death “I’m looking forward to working with HBO, Amblin Television, and our director, Laurent Bouzereau, to create this unprecedented portrait of a woman who was an actress, a legend, and, ultimately, my mother,” Gregson Wagner said in a statement.

Two years ago, Gregson Wagner explained her desire to protect her mother’s memory.

“I’m 46 [years old] now, and she died when she was 43,” she told the Los Angeles Times, while promoting a coffee-table book and perfume dedicated to her mother. “So I feel like I’m her mom now in the way that I am shepherding her legacy out into the world the way a parent would take care of a child. It’s come full circle and has been incredibly healing.”

Last month marked the 37th anniversary of Wood’s death. While Wood’s sister, Lana, has remained outspoken about the mysterious circumstances of Wood’s drowning—and her suspicion of Wood’s husband, Robert Wagner, who was on board the yacht from which Wood fell—Gregson Wagner has remained adamant that Wagner, the stepfather who raised her after her mother’s death, was not involved.

“I know that she drowned, and I know it was an accident,” Gregson Wagner said, in a rare statement about her mother’s death, to The New York Times two years ago. “The details of did she hit her head and fall into the water, or did she fall into the water and then hit her head—those little things don’t concern me. The result is the same: she died. And she left when I was 11 and my sister was 7, and we needed her.”