A hard-working actress for decades — she first appeared as the little girl in Miracle on 34th Street before going on to star in Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story — Natalie Wood died at the age of 43. On Nov. 29, 1981, she drowned after falling off a boat near Catalina Island, Calif. Wood, husband Robert Wagner and actor Christopher Walken had retired to the yacht Splendour after a large dinner and many glasses of wine. Wood and Walken were in the middle of filming the sci-fi flick Brainstorm, about a machine that gives people the ability to experience others' pre-recorded emotions. Production on the film, directed by Close Encounters of the Third Kind visual effects maven Douglas Trumbull, was halted for over a year before its release in 1983.
See TIME's 1981 story on the last hours of Natalie Wood