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The woman the world would come to know as Natalie Wood was born Natalia Nikolayevna Zakarenko on July 20th, 1938 in San Francisco.

And her parents were Russian immigrants.

Both had fled a country torn apart by revolution, carrying with them the scars of leaving what they knew and the stubborn hope that America might give them something better.

And her mother, Maria, would come from Barnaul, a city in Southwestern Siberia.

Now the family had money once.

Maria's father ran soap and candle factories and kept an estate on the outskirts of Barnaul.

But the Russian Civil War wiped out everything they had.

So the family got out of the country and ended up in Harbin, China, living as refugees.

And it was in Harbin that something strange allegedly happened.

Maria and her sisters visited a gypsy fortune teller that made two predictions about Maria's future.

The first was her second child would be a great beauty known throughout the world.

And the second was quote unquote, beware of dark water.

And Maria never let go of either prophecy, but she would eventually leave China and marry an American mechanic named Alexander Tuttloff in 1925.

And Olga, Natalie's older half-sister, was born in 1928.

And two years later, the family sailed to America.

And the marriage ended six years later.

And Natalie's father, Nicholas Zakarenko, came from Uzursk in Russia's Far East.