Daily Mail, Wednesday January 21, 2004

Stunningly similar, the British actress and the film legend she portrays

THE NATURAL NATALIE

By Tony Bonnici
Showbusiness Reporter

Their enchanting, enigmatic expressions are uncannily similar. Likewise their elegance and poise.

One is Natalie Wood, legend of Hollywood. The other is Justine Waddell, an aspiring British actress who could be on the way to achieving stardom of her own.
Miss Waddell is playing the film icon in a dramatisation of her turbulent, tragically sort life. The 26 year old was offered the role after the producers noticed their remarkable similarities.

A Cambridge graduate, Miss Waddell has appeared in costume dramas Mansfield Park and Great Expectations. But ABC Televisions' lavish three hour US production "The Mystery of Natalie Wood", to be screened there in March, will be her biggest role to date.

"Besides looking eerily like Natalie, she's a superb young actress," said director Peter Bogdanovich. "Justine has the ability to capture all the different stages of her life."

Miss Waddell, who read social and political science before discovering her talent for acting, has joked that they also shared a limited singing voice.
"I sang and then they dubbed- rather like Natalie in West Side Story," she said referring to one of Miss Wood's most famous film roles.

Born in 1938, Natalie Wood was a child star before developing into a talented adult performer. Her love life was chequered - she had affairs with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and married Robert Wagner twice.

She died, in mysterious circumstances in a 1981 boating accident.