Fay Wray, best remembered as a giant ape's highly vocal love interest in the 1933 interspecies-romance classic King Kong, died in New York City on August 8, 2004. Wray would have turned 97 on September 15.
Fay Wray
Besides the blockbuster King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the Canadian-born Wray (Sept. 15, 1907, in Cardston, Alberta) also screamed and/or fainted in several other motion pictures of the 1930s, including Schoedsack and Irving Pichel's first-rate thriller The Most Dangerous Game / The Hounds of Zaroff (1932), opposite Joel McCrea and mad hunter Leslie Banks, and a couple of two-strip Technicolor horror films directed by Michael Curtiz: Doctor X (1932) and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), both starring Lionel Atwill.
At the minor Majestic studios, Wray and Atwill were paired up again in Frank R. Strayer's The Vampire Bat (1933). Additionally, Wray found herself surrounded by danger and Jack Holt in Black Moon (1934), danger and Ralph Bellamy in Below the Sea (1933) and Woman in the Dark (1934), and danger and Claude Rains in The Clairvoyant (1935).
Though remembered as the Scream Queen of Old Hollywood, Wray actually played a wide range of roles in a career that spanned more than half a century in film, on stage, and on television. Powerful vocal chords or no, she was at her best as an unhappy bride in Erich von Stroheim's silent melodrama The Wedding March (1927) and as a flirtatious young maiden in the Gregory La Cava-directed Twentieth Century production The Affairs of Cellini (1934), in which she displayed her light-comedy skills to good advantage while holding her own opposite Fredric March, Constance Bennett, and Frank Morgan.
"[Stroheim] had such a reputation of being militaristic, of cracking a whip," Wray, as quoted in The Independent, would tell film historian Kevin Brownlow. "But he was a very genteel person, immaculately dressed in white linen. When Stroheim had finished telling the story of the film [The Wedding March], he asked, 'Do you think you could play Mitzi?' I said 'I know I could.' And he offered me his hand and said 'Goodbye, Mitzi.'
"And when he said that, that was my answer. I couldn't take his hand. I could only put my face in my hands and cry. And I heard him say, 'Oh, I can work with her.' I knew from that moment that my life was going to be immensely different."
Among Wray's other film appearances during that time are those in George Abbott's adventure drama The Sea God (1930), with Richard Arlen; Frank Capra's adventure drama Dirigible (1931), with Jack Holt and Ralph Graves; John Francis Dillon's socially conscious crime drama The Finger Points (1931), with good-guy-gone-bad Richard Barthelmess; and George Fitzmaurice's romantic melodrama The Unholy Garden (1931), with Ronald Colman and Estelle Taylor.
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