Fay Wray: Fay Wray, who screamed her way into movie history as the apple of King Kong's eye, died last Sunday. She was 96.
Wray was already a silent screen and talkie star when at age 25 she was cast by director Merian C. Cooper as Ann Darrow - a.k.a. "the girl" - in the 1933 film King Kong.
Although she made about 80 movies, her fame as a co-star to a giant ape - she referred to her unrequited lover simply as "Kong"- far outlasted the notoriety she got from her films with the pantheon of Hollywood's leading men, including Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, William Powell and Spencer Tracy.
For many years Wray resisted the attention that came to her for her role opposite her "tallest, darkest leading man". But she eventually embraced King Kong with good humour.
"I'm liking it better now than I did in the beginning, when it seemed to me that it was not Shakespeare," she told an interviewer in 1994. She called the movie "my greeting card" and said that everyone - even Laurence Olivier - grilled her about how one of the greatest special-effects movies was made.
Well into her later years, Wray continued to travel to film events where she was feted as the "scream queen", although she remained surprised by the accolades she got for a performance that she hardly considered acting. "I yelled every time they said 'Yell'," she said of the role, for which she was paid $10,000 for 10 weeks' work - good pay for Hollywood in the Depression.
RKO Pictures got more than its money's worth - the movie grossed nearly $90,000 in its first four days, a fortune at a time when movie tickets were 15 cents. What's more, Wray recorded some of her sensuous moans and shrieks for the studio, which were later used in other horror films.
She played Ann Darrow, an unemployed actress invited by a film producer on a long voyage to mysterious Skull Island. The producer uses Darrow as bait to capture Kong and then puts the towering creature on display for all New York to see.
The plan goes awry as Kong starts on a big-city rampage in search of Darrow. In the end, he literally falls for her - from the Empire State Building.
"It was beauty killed the beast," the producer moralised.
"The final scene is really moving, where Kong is shot as he stands on the Empire State Building and clutches his breast, but then stretches out his hand to where I am," she told an interviewer in 1998. "A great piece of acting from that little fellow."
And Wray did mean little. Although King Kong was several stories high in the film, he was in reality 18 inches of cloth, metal and rubber brought to life by special effects genius Willis O'Brien.
The only part of the monster that actually was big was the 6ft-long arm and paw that cradled her in many scenes. "I'd jump on board and be towed up and pretend to be screaming at this 40ft monster," Wray told an interviewer.
After King Kong found a new generation of fans when it became regular fare on black-and-white TV in the 1950s, Wray cheerily succumbed to her fate and even made a tribute to the lovesick gorilla in her appropriately titled 1989 biography, On the One Hand.
In an open letter to King Kong, she said: "To speak of me is to think of you. To speak to me is often a prelude to questions about you."
The book party for her autobiography was held at the Empire State Building.
One of the last remaining screen stars from Hollywood's golden era, the blue-eyed Wray began in films as an extra in the silents as a teenager, playing in "two-reeler" Westerns, which ran 20 or 25 minutes and were shown with a feature film. Soon she was doing five-reelers. Few are remembered today.
"I was known as the queen of the Bs," she said in 1990. "If only I'd been a little more selective."
Her first big role, in the monumental silent film by Erich von Stroheim, The Wedding March, launched Wray into stardom. The 1928 melodrama starred von Stroheim as a Viennese prince unable to choose the woman he loved - Wray in the role of Mitzi - over a rich woman who could secure his future.
"I never did get another director as great as Stroheim," she told the Guardian in 1998. "His genius was an infinite capacity for taking care of detail. In the beer-garden scene, which was the first I shot with him, he had had thousands of blossoms made by hand, some in wax and some in paper, so that they would flutter down on where we sat. And even though it was a silent film, he insisted that the actors should speak precise lines."
It was the role of which Wray was the most proud and which would make her famous throughout her life among more artsy film buffs around the world.
Vina Fay Wray, always known as Fay, was born in 1907, in Alberta, Canada. When her father, a rancher, hit hard times, the family moved to Arizona and then to Utah. Her parents later divorced, and her mother, worried about her daughter's health after another daughter had died of influenza, allowed a family friend, a photographer, to escort the 14-year-old Fay to Los Angeles. Her mother soon followed.
Wray attended Hollywood High School, where she got interested in drama. Her first motion picture role was in Gasoline Love (1923).
Wray's 1928 marriage to John Monk Saunders, who wrote the first film to win an Academy Award, the silent Wings, ended shortly before he committed suicide. In 1942 she left acting to embark on an idyllic marriage to another writer, Robert Riskin, the Academy Award-winning writer of Frank Capra comedies, including It Happened One Night and Mr Deeds Goes to Town.
Riskin died in 1955 after a long illness, an event that finally pressed Wray, by then the mother of three children, out of retirement for several years. Her third husband, physician Sanford Rothenberg, died in 1991.
She is survived by her children, Susan Riskin, her daughter by Saunders, of New York; Robert Riskin, owner of McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California; and Victoria Riskin Rintels, former president of Writers' Guild of America-West; and two grandchildren.
Fay Wray: born September 15th, 1907; died August 8th, 2004