Fay Wray
Fay Wray, best remembered as King Kong’s highly vocal love interest in the 1933 interspecies-romance classic, died in New York City on August 8, 2004. She would have turned 97 on September 15.
Besides King Kong (1933), 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. Additionally, Wray and Atwill were paired again in The Vampire Bat (1933) at the minor Majestic studios.
Though regarded as the Screaming Queen of Old Hollywood, Wray 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 Twentieth Century production The Affairs of Cellini (1934), in which she displayed her light-comedy skills to good advantage.
"[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 William A. Wellman’s Legion of the Condemned (1928), opposite Gary Cooper; the Western The Texan (1930), also with Cooper; Frank Capra’s adventure drama Dirigible (1931); and George Fitzmaurice’s romantic melodrama The Unholy Garden (1931), with Ronald Colman.
Unlike Gary Cooper, with whom she was paired in four films (the other two were The First Kiss [1928] and One Sunday Afternoon [1933]), Wray never became a superstar. In fact, King Kong or not, by the mid-1930s she was mostly cast in supporting roles in A productions or leads in B fare, including The Richest Girl in the World (1934), supporting Miriam Hopkins; the B comedy They Met in a Taxi (1936), with Chester Morris; the B mystery Murder in Greenwich Village (1937), with Richard Arlen; and Gregory Ratoff’s Adam Had Four Sons (1941), a likable romantic drama in which Wray conveniently dies so Ingrid Bergman can find happiness with widower Warner Baxter.
In 1942, Wray retired from films after marrying screenwriter Robert Riskin, best known for his socially conscious collaborations with Frank Capra, but returned to the big screen in minor roles in the early 1950s. (Riskin died in 1955. Wray had been previously married to writer and aviator John Monk Saunders [1928-1939], an alcoholic who developed a serious drug problem during their marriage. Saunders committed suicide the year after his separation from Wray became final.)
Among her latter film roles were those in Small Town Girl (1953), starring Jane Powell; Queen Bee (1955), with Joan Crawford; Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), with Debbie Reynolds; and her last two feature films, The Reckless Age and Summer Love, both released in 1958.
Wray also guested in numerous television series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse 90, and Perry Mason. Her last television credit was a supporting role in the 1980 TV movie Gideon’s Trumpet, starring Henry Fonda.
One of my most pleasant surprises — and, paradoxically, biggest disappointments — while working on my Ramon Novarro biography a few years ago was when I arrived home early one evening to find a voice message left by Fay Wray. Unfortunately, we would never connect after that one call.
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Tags: Classic Movies, Erich von Stroheim, Fay Wray, John Monk Saunders, King Kong, Robert Riskin, The Affairs of Cellini, The Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Wedding March
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