Fay Wray(1907-2004)
- Actress
- Writer
- Camera and Electrical Department
Canadian-born Fay Wray was brought up in Los Angeles and entered films
at an early age. She was barely in her teens when she started working
as an extra. She began her career as a heroine in westerns at Universal
during the silent era. In 1926 the Western Association of Motion
Picture Advertisers selected 13 young starlets it deemed most likely to
succeed in pictures. Fay was chosen as one of these starlets, along
with Janet Gaynor and Mary Astor. Fame would indeed come to Fay when she played
another heroine in Erich von Stroheim's La symphonie nuptiale (1928). She continued playing leads in a
number of films, such as the good-bad girl in La rafle (1929). By the early
1930s she was at Paramount working with Gary Cooper and Jack Holt in a number
of average films, such as Le maître des hauts-fourneaux (1933). She also appeared in such horror
films as Docteur X (1932) and The Vampire Bat (1933). In 1933 Fay was approached by producer
Merian C. Cooper, who told her that he had a part for her in a picture in which
she would be working with a tall, dark leading man. What he didn't tell
her was that her "tall, dark leading man" was a giant gorilla, and the
picture turned out to be the classic King Kong (1933). Perhaps no one in the
history of pictures could scream more dramatically than Fay, and she
really put on a show in "Kong". Her character provided a combination of
sex appeal, vulnerability and lung capacity as she was stalked by the
giant beast all the way to the top of the Empire State Building. That
was as far as Fay would rise, however, as this was, after all, just
another horror movie. After "Kong", she began a slow decline that put
her into low-budget action films by the mid '30s. In 1939 her 11-year
marriage to screenwriter John Monk Saunders ended in divorce, and her career was
almost finished. In 1942 she remarried and retired from the screen,
forever to be remembered as the "beauty who killed the beast" in "King
Kong". However, in 1953 she made a comeback, playing mature character
roles, and also appeared on television as Catherine, Natalie Wood's mother,
in The Pride of the Family (1953). She continued to appear in films until 1958 and television
into the 1960s.
