In therapy since her mother Natalie Wood's tragic death when she was 11, seemingly cute-as-a-button Natasha Gregson Wagner has opted for complicated female characters in dark, offbeat films because they are "more like myself." The daughter of producer-writer Richard Gregson and adopted daughter of actor Robert Wagner, the lovely dark-haired actress brings to mind her mother at a similar age. She made her feature debut in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1992) and has also appeared in "Fathers and Sons" (1994), her then-boyfriend Josh Evans' directorial debut "Inside the Goldmine" (1994))--she would later appear in Evan's grim noir "Glam" (2001)--and "High School High" (1996). In David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), she breathed life into Sheila, the two-timed girlfriend of Balthazar Getty, and in a more central role in James Toback's "Two Girls and Guys" (1998) played the scrappy, streetwise Lou, giving a performance that was magnetic and interesting in a picture that didn't quite deliver on its potential as a great sex farce. She followed an even more advernturously sexual role, frequently minus any clothing, in the unusual "First Love, Last Rites" (1997) opposite Giovanni Ribisi as a couple who spends much of the film either talking endlessly about their relationship or engaging in sex.
After well-received roles in indie features such as writer-director George Hickenlooper's "Dogtown" and "Another Day in Paradise" (1998)--where she played the distaff half of a young couple of drug addicts/theives taken under the wings of more experienced operators (James Woods and Melanie Griffith), Wagner went mainstream with supporting turns in such films as a college student-slasher victim in the "Scream"-inspired horror flick "Urban Legends" (1998), as Hugh Hefner's ill-fated assistant Bobbie Arnstein in the TV biopic "Hefner Unauthorized" (1999), in the little-seen thriller "Stranger Than Fiction" (1999), as one of John Cusack's many bedeviling women in "High Fidelity" (2000), and the John Carpenter-produced horror sequel "Vampires: Los Muertos" (2002), as well as Tv spots as a regular on the Mike White-penned, short-lived soap opera "Pasadena" (Fox, 2001) and the equally brief small screen version of Jake Kasdan's "The Zero Effect" (2002) .
Wagner would continue to land leading roles in avant garde indies such as "Wishing Time" (2003) as well as appearing in the ensembles of films such as "Wonderland" (2003), the dazzling but unsatisfying depiction of Los Angeles' real life Wonderland Avenue murders of 1981 which involved porn legend John Holmes; Wagner played a small but winning part as Barbara Richardson, arguably the most innocent of the four murder victims.