Natalie Norwick

Natalie Norwick (May 28, 1923 – December 20, 2007) was an American actor born Natalie Theodora Katz in the Bronx, New York, to Russian immigrants Isidore Katz, a theatre musician, and Lillian Waxberg Katz. She grew up speaking Russian as her first language alongside English, and had one sibling, her twin sister Gloria Katz. Her performing career spanned 54 years across stage, television, and film. Though she later became associated with Smithtown, New York, her roots were in the Bronx, where she completed high school by 1940.

Norwick began her stage work in the mid-1940s under her adopted professional name. In October 1945 she played Eliza in a touring musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the following April appeared in The Servant of Two Masters, produced by Equity Library Theatre at the Harlem Library auditorium. That summer she took on the role of Jane Bennet in a stock production of Pride and Prejudice. She joined the national touring company of Lute Song following its 1946 Broadway run, cast as the Page while understudying first Mary Martin and then Dolly Haas in the female lead. During that tour, male lead Yul Brynner assisted her in transitioning from character work to leading-lady performance, an experience she later credited alongside the instruction of her primary drama coach, Uta Hagen. In August 1948 she was cast in a feature role as Mademoiselle in Town House, a comedy directed and produced by Kaufman and Gordon, performing throughout its two-week Boston tryout before the part was cut prior to the Broadway opening. The production itself ran only twelve performances at the National Theatre.

During the summer of 1949, Norwick performed a season of stock at the Cobleigh Show Shop in Canton, Connecticut, playing "the other woman" in both Made in Heaven and John Loves Mary. She subsequently toured a revival of The Barretts of Wimpole Street through the Mid-Atlantic states, Missouri, and Michigan, receiving favorable notices from multiple reviewers for her portrayal of Cousin Bella. On June 4, 1949, she married New York television director Bernard Robertson in Stamford, Connecticut, with the name Norwick already appearing as her legal surname on the official record. The marriage later ended in divorce in Santa Monica, California.

Norwick's first television experience predated her stage career's full development: in May 1945 she was among eight cast members in a one-time dual radio and television broadcast of The Town Crier of Chungking, produced through a collaboration between radio station WNEW and DuMont's WABD. In August and September 1950 she appeared in single episodes of two NBC live anthology series, The Clock and Armstrong Circle Theatre, and subsequently appeared as herself on The Robert Q. Lewis Show and The Show Goes On, both hosted by Robert Q. Lewis. In 1951 she also appeared without credit in Fourteen Hours, a 20th Century Fox film shot on location in New York City and directed by Henry Hathaway. The following year brought two more anthology television credits, Kraft Television Theatre and Studio One. During the winter of 1952–53 she toured the Mid-Atlantic states with the Bliss Repertory Company, taking the female lead in P. G. Wodehouse's 1929 play Candle Light and the role of Phebe in As You Like It. A bout of laryngitis following weeks of performing in drafty venues may have contributed to her subsequent decision to relocate to the West Coast.

Before settling permanently in California, Norwick had worked there once previously in a stage production of Detective Story starring Robert Preston. She moved west in early 1954 and by May had begun work on I Led 3 Lives, the first of four television series in which she appeared that year. A guest role on Medic in the episode "With This Ring," in which she played an unwed mother-to-be, proved particularly significant, generating publicity and initiating a professional relationship with the series star, Richard Boone. Boone became a television mentor to Norwick, and his production company later cast her in seven episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel. The two also appeared together in a production of Wuthering Heights, with Norwick as Isabella to Boone's Heathcliff. She also took small credited film roles in 23 Paces to Baker Street (1956) and Hidden Fear (1957) before concentrating her work entirely on television, where she appeared in dozens of series through the early 1960s in a range of character parts. Among her later television credits was a 1966 appearance in the Star Trek episode "The Conscience of the King."

As anthology series declined and the pace of her television work slowed, Norwick returned to the stage. She played the Samurai's Wife in a Los Angeles stage adaptation of Rashomon and appeared as Hippolyta in a single performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her television work concluded in 1982. In 1979 she appeared on Broadway in Break a Leg, playing her own role and understudying the female lead, Julie Harris.

Broadway called once more in 1997, when Norwick was cast as standby to Julie Harris in a revival of The Gin Game at the Lyceum Theatre. The two-person production co-starred Charles Durning, with Tom Troupe serving as his standby. The revival ran 19 previews and 145 performances from April 5 to August 31, 1997. The Broadway company, Norwick included, then embarked on a seven-month national tour beginning October 28, 1998. When Harris suffered a fall while the tour was playing Stamford, Connecticut, in late February 1999, and subsequently required emergency surgery for a fluid buildup upon reaching Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Norwick performed the remaining shows at the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale and the opening performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Harris rejoined the cast before the tour concluded in Boston.

Following The Gin Game, Norwick retired to Coconut Creek, Florida. She died there on December 20, 2007, at the age of 84.