In this vibrant memoir, an actress daughter remembers her actress mother through personal recollection, dedicated research and family lore.

Natalie Wood was a film icon whose career began when she was a child. Pressured to work in order to support her Russian immigrant family, she continued acting right up to the time of her death. She died tragically, drowning alone and unseen, in 1981. Her oldest daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, remembers every detail of that event and the ways it affected her and her younger sister. Therapy was one result, and later, a sense that it was incumbent on her to preserve and, in some way, defend the memory of the woman who loved her and raised her with care and tenderness.

"...[a] vibrant memoir... [W]hat Natasha most wishes to convey is that her mother was a strong-minded, beautiful woman who embraced life head-on and should be remembered for her achievements in life."

Natasha’s childhood, as a girl with “two fathers” (Richard Gregson, her birth father, and actor Robert Wagner, her stepfather), was obviously unconventional, privileged in a way yet involving long periods of absence when Natalie was making a movie. She recalls that her mother always went on a diet before a film production, that she was intensely focused and highly enthusiastic about her profession, and that she tried to protect her daughters from seeing any part of her movies that might upset them.

Having had a fraught upbringing herself, more accustomed to flashbulbs than attention from family, Natalie was determined --- and Wagner with her --- to attend to such things as picking Natasha up from school and taking her to her piano lessons. Still, she was away often, so Natasha developed little rituals meant to ensure her mother’s safety: stepping on certain squares of carpet as she approached her bedroom, and lining up all of her dolls and stuffed animals in a certain way.

Natasha has written about her mother previously (NATALIE WOOD: Reflections on a Legendary Life) and co-produced a documentary, Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, for HBO. But her own life has had many twists and turns apart from the light of fame cast by her mother. Here she recounts her struggles with depression and her deep need to successfully carry on the acting tradition so strongly embedded in her heritage.

MORE THAN LOVE opens and closes with the scene and the speculations surrounding the death of Natalie Wood, and naturally readers will appreciate those details. But what Natasha most wishes to convey is that her mother was a strong-minded, beautiful woman who embraced life head-on and should be remembered for her achievements in life.