Meet Natalie Wood's Granddaughter, Who's Named After One of Her Most Famous Roles (Exclusive)

Natalie Wood's daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner reflects on her mom's career in TCM's "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of"

When Natalie Wood’s granddaughter, Clover, began seventh grade this year, she told her teacher her first name. "Oh," he said of her unique name, “You've probably never heard of this movie, but it's called Inside Daisy Clover."

"I didn't know what to say,” Clover later told her mom, Natasha Gregson Wagner, “so I didn't say anything." So Natasha told her, "Well, you can go up to him privately and tell him that's your grandma."

Clover, the 12-year-old daughter of Natasha and her husband, actor Barry Watson, is indeed named after her grandmother’s character in the 1965 film Inside Daisy Clover, starring Wood opposite a then-relatively unknown actor, Robert Redford.

Natasha recently brought Clover to the Warner Brothers Archives in Burbank to learn more about "Grandma Natalie" and to see — and touch — some of the her film costumes as part of a new TCM Original series, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, airing Nov. 1 in the 10 p.m. hour. Natasha’s segment is the first in the new series.

Related: Natalie Wood: A Hollywood Life Cut Short, in Pictures

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It’s also part of a larger effort by Natasha, 54, to rediscover and reclaim her mom, the star of such classics as West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass, who died by drowning on Nov. 29, 1981, while on a sailing trip to Catalina Island with her husband Robert Wagner, along with actor Christopher Walken. Especially after the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death began to overshadow her life and her groundbreaking career. (Wood had her first starring role at age 8 in Miracle on 34th Street and was one of the few child stars to become a true movie star.)

But in 2016, Natasha, the daughter of Wood and her second husband, British producer Richard Gregson, began sharing her memories more publicly, with the launch of the fragrance line, Natalie, followed in 2020 with a documentary What Remains Behind, and a memoir More Than Love: An Intimate Portrait of My Mother, Natalie Wood.

“It's been the best thing I could have done, even though it was the scariest thing I could have done,” Natasha, who was 11 when her mom died, tells PEOPLE. “Because I think the thing that held me back so much was that grief is so private, and her death was so public. And so I felt like I had to stay small and invisible — and private. But that was not good for my mental health.”

Sharing her memories, she says, has made her feel “safer and stronger.” As Natasha explains, “I have more of a mission because it's not just about having a famous mom, it's also about survival of grief and what that looks like. And I have a bit of a story to tell around it because I am not a victim of it. I've gotten through it.”

“I feel this real responsibility to share her,” she continues, “and I just want to help Clover understand who she was too.”

Meanwhile her daughter has become more curious about her famous grandmother. “I think of it like beads on a string,” she says. “It's like a necklace she's putting together, and that archive visit was one of the beads on the string of knowing her grandma, until one day she will have this complete necklace and she'll know who she was.”

In turn, she wonders if her daughter also has a bit of “Grandma Natalie” herself.

“Clover has a real sense of herself and a real value of herself,” she says. “My mom always fought for her worth in the business that she was in. Maybe Clover has that and my mom is making sure that goes forward in her granddaughter.”