Fay Wray

Fay Wray Headshot

Actress

Birth Date: September 15, 1907

Death Date: August 8, 2004

Birth Place: Cardston, Alberta, Canada

Gripped in the giant hand of "King Kong" (1933) in a simulated New York City on the RKO backlot, Fay Wray emitted screams of terror that reverberated throughout a nation stunned by the Great Depression. By the time the Canadian native was cast in the role of Ann Darrow, human inamorata of the eighth Wonder of the World, Wray was already a successful Hollywood actress whose previous leading men included William Powell, Gary Cooper and Fredric March. Although she had retired in 1942, the death of her second husband, screenwriter Robert Riskin, drove the actress back to work in character parts, including a comedic turn as an affluent hypochondriac in "Tammy and the Bachelor" (1957). An iconic figure in cult film circles, Wray eventually turned her back on performing to enjoy frequent public appearances as herself. Living well into her nineties, Wray turned down the offer to contribute a cameo appearance to director Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of "King Kong" shortly before her death from natural causes in late 2004. Though she appeared in all manner of movies, from dramas and comedies to horror films and the early Westerns in which she had performed her own stunts, Fay Wray would be remembered principally for her most famous role, as well as for the honor of being cinema's first bona fide scream queen.

Vina Fay Wray was born on Sept. 15, 1907, in Cardston, Alberta, Canada. At the time, she was the youngest of the four children of rancher and saw mill proprietor Joseph Herber Wray and his wife, Elvina Marguerite Jones, a former school teacher. The harsh Canadian winters eventually drove Vina Wray to the brink of a nervous breakdown; while she recovered in a sanitarium, her children were farmed out to local families. Immigrating to the United States after World War I, the Wrays settled in Salt Lake City, UT, where Joseph Wray worked as a night watchman. As a young girl, Wray enjoyed trips to the local movie theater and made her stage debut as Mrs. Claus in a school Christmas pageant. Wray's parents separated shortly after the family relocated again, to Lark, UT, where her father had found work in a copper mine. By this time, the family had grown with the addition of two more children.

When she was 12 years old, Wray took part in a Salt Lake City newspaper subscription drive whose grand prize was a starring role in a moving picture. When her film debut turned out to be no more than a single scene photographed as part of a publicity stunt, Wray accepted a menial job with the same newspaper, stuffing envelopes. When she was 14 years old, Wray was sent with her older sister Willow to the more forgiving climate of Los Angeles, where she lived with a succession of friends and enrolled as a student, first at the Thirtieth Street Junior High School and eventually Hollywood High School. At the age of 15, Wray lodged her foot in the door of the burgeoning film industry with bits in two-reelers before winning a starring role in Bud Barsky's "The Coast Patrol" (1925). Given a six-month contract with Hal Roach Studios, Wray appeared in a number of silent comedies, earning $60 a week, and sometimes carpooling to the studio with future Academy Award winner Janet Gaynor.

Lured away to Universal Studios with the promise of more work and a $15 a week pay increase, Wray appeared in a string of Westerns, often performing her own stunts on horseback. She was the leading lady of cowboy actor Hoot Gibson in "The Man in the Saddle" (1926) and appeared in several films by director William Wyler. Along with Joan Crawford, Mary Astor and Delores Del Rio, Wray was one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) Baby Stars of 1926. On loan to Paramount, she was paired with rising star Gary Cooper in William Wellman's "The Legion of the Condemned" (1928). Wray abdicated her spot at Universal to work with auteur Erich von Stroheim on "The Wedding March" (1928). After nine months of filming, the ambitious project was taken away from its creator (its running time split down the middle and released as two separate films) by Paramount, who subsequently claimed Wray's contract.

As a Paramount employee, Wray survived Hollywood's transition to sound films that had finished many a career from the silent epoch. For director Merian C. Cooper, she appeared in "The Four Feathers" (1929), alongside William Powell and Richard Arlen, while reuniting with Gary Cooper for "The Texan" and "The First Kiss" (1928). After the stock market crash of 1929, a cash-strapped Paramount began to loan out its contract players to other studios. For Columbia, Wray played the leading lady to Jack Holt in "Dirigible" (1931), an early film by director Frank Capra, and for the Samuel Goldwyn Company she was paired with Ronald Colman in the Sahara-set "The Unholy Garden" (1931). Married in 1928 to John Monk Saunders, Wray lost the lead role in William Dieterle's "The Last Flight" (1931), based on Saunders' novel Single Lady; she made her Broadway debut in a short-lived musical adaptation of the book in the fall of that year alongside a young British actor named Archie Leach who would find success in Hollywood as Cary Grant.

Back in Hollywood, the diminutive and dimpled actress was put to good use as a prototypal scream queen in a number of early horror thrillers - among them the early Technicolor spookshows "Doctor X" (1932) and "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933), both directed by Michael Curtiz, and Frank Strayer's Poverty Row cheapie "The Vampire Bat" (1933). The apotheosis of Wray's tenure as a damsel-in-distress came with her casting in Merian C. Cooper's "King Kong" (1933), directed in tandem with Ernest B. Schoedsack at RKO. The quintessential monster-on-the-loose story benefited greatly from the pioneering stop-motion special effects of Willis O'Brien, allowing a giant ape to run amuck on an uncharted South Seas atoll and later in Depression era New York City and to come to his sad end after climbing - with Fay Wray clutched in one massive hairy mitt - to the top of the Empire State Building, then still under construction. Her blood curdling screams as the obsessed ape took possession of her would become one of cinema's most iconic scenes in the history of the medium.

Though Wray worked on "King Kong" for a total of 10 weeks, production tied her up for 10 full months, from which she collected a paycheck of only $10,000. During the making of the film, Cooper and Schoedsack produced a modestly-priced island thriller, which Schoedsack co-directed with Irving Pichel. Based on the story by Richard Connell, "The Most Dangerous Game" (1932) utilized standing jungle sets from "King Kong" and some of the film's supporting actors. Cast opposite Joel McCrae as a pair of island castaways hunted by a Russian nobleman with a taste for human trophies, Wray did less screaming than in "King Kong" and revealed a markedly grittier and more resourceful side. Though her acting career would continue for several decades, the cultural impact of her career rested squarely with two performances. By 1933, she had also become a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Signing a non-exclusive contract with Columbia, Wray appeared around town in a flurry of features through the next few years. At Paramount, she played an atypical bad girl role in "One Sunday Afternoon" (1933), again opposite Gary Cooper. At Fox, she was paired with Spencer Tracy in John G. Blystone's "Shanghai Madness" (1933), and at Universal she played a young actress who passes herself off as "The Countess of Monte Cristo" (1934). At Columbia, she fled from voodoo practitioners in "Black Moon" (1934) and at RKO she switched places with Miriam Hopkins to play at being "The Richest Girl in the World" (1934). In England, she appeared in "Alias Bulldog Drummond" (1935) with Ralph Richardson and "The Clairvoyant" (1935), starring Claude Rains, but lost out back home on a coveted role in Frank Capra's classic "Lost Horizon" (1937). In 1939, Wray divorced Saunders, whose alcoholism had spiraled towards increasing mental instability. He committed suicide by hanging in Florida in 1940. In 1942, Wray married legendary screenwriter Robert Riskin and effectively retired from show business.

Crippled by a stroke in 1950, Riskin died in 1955. During this time, Wray appeared in a few films in supporting roles before resuming her career as a regular on the ABC situation comedy "The Pride of the Family" (1954-55), which also provided two seasons of work for a 15-year-old Natalie Wood. In Vincente Minnelli's "The Cobweb" (1955), Wray enjoyed the small but pivotal role of the wife of Charles Boyer's disgraced psychiatrist, and she reteamed with her fellow WAMPAS star Joan Crawford for the campy "Queen Bee" (1955). In "Hell on Frisco Bay" (1956), Wray's testimony saved the reputation and neck of star-producer Alan Ladd and in "Tammy and the Bachelor" (1957), she was the stick-in-the-mud mother of leading man Leslie Nielson. Working mainly in television through the end of the decade, Wray capped her career with an appearance in a 1965 episode of the long-running courtroom drama "Perry Mason" (CBS, 1957-1966), though she again came out of retirement for the fact-based telefilm "Gideon's Trumpet" (1980), starring Henry Fonda.

In 1970, Wray married one of the doctors who had attended her late husband, Riskin, and retreated into family life, world travel and occasional public appearances, such as the 70th Academy Awards Presentation. An iconic figure in cult film circles, Wray enjoyed frequent public appearances as herself. In 1989, she published her memoirs, which bore the wry title On the Other Hand. Filmmaker Peter Jackson attempted to lure the nonagenarian out of retirement one last time to contribute a cameo to his proposed big budget remake of "King Kong" (2005), but Wray demurred. Following her death at age 96 from natural causes in Manhattan on Aug. 8, 2004, the lights at the top of the Empire State Building were dimmed in her honor. Wray was buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, not far from the former citrus groves in which she had strolled as a young woman and the studios for which she had made for herself a life in pictures.

By Richard Harland Smith

Credits

Extrait : Retour de flamme

Actor
Show
2014

Le Droit à la justice

Actor
Movie
1980

Gideon's Trumpet

Actor
Edna Curtis
Movie
1980

Islanders

Guest Star
Show
1960

The David Niven Show

Host
Allison
Show
1959

77 Sunset Strip

Guest Star
Clara
Series
1958

Dragstrip Riot

Actor
Norma Martin
Movie
1958

Perry MasonStream

Guest Star
Ethel Harrison
Series
1957

Wagon TrainStream

Guest Star
Series
1957

Crime of Passion

Actor
Alice Pope
Movie
1957

Tammy and the Bachelor

Actor
Mrs. Brent
Movie
1957

Telephone Time

Actor
Show
1956

Hour of Stars

Actor
Show
1955

Screen Directors Playhouse

Actor
Show
1955

Alfred Hitchcock PresentsStream

Actor
Mrs. Nelson
Series
1955

Damon Runyon Theater

Actor
Show
1955

Pride of the Family

Actor
Catherine Morrison; Albie's wife
Show
1953

Treasure of the Golden Condor

Actor
Annette
Movie
1953

Small Town Girl

Actor
Mrs. Gordon Kimbell
Movie
1953

Not a Ladies' Man

Actor
Miss Hunter
Movie
1942

Adam Had Four Sons

Actor
Molly Stoddard
Movie
1941

Melody for Three

Actor
Mary Stanley
Movie
1941

Wildcat Bus

Actor
Ted Dawson
Movie
1940

Navy Secrets

Actor
Carol Mathews
Movie
1939

It Happened in Hollywood

Actor
Gloria Gay
Movie
1937

Murder in Greenwich Village

Actor
Kay Cabot/Lucky
Movie
1937

They Met in a Taxi

Actor
Mary Trenton
Movie
1936

When Knights Were Bold

Actor
Lady Rowena
Movie
1936

The Evil Mind

Actor
Rene
Movie
1935

Bulldog Jack

Actor
Ann Manders
Movie
1935

Mills of the Gods

Actor
Jean Hastings
Movie
1935

Once to Every Woman

Actor
Mary Fanshane
Movie
1934

The Countess of Monte Cristo

Actor
Janet Krueger
Movie
1934

Viva Villa!

Actor
Teresa
Movie
1934

Black Moon

Actor
Gail Hamilton
Movie
1934

The Richest Girl in the World

Actor
Sylvia Lockwood
Movie
1934

The Affairs of Cellini

Actor
Angela
Movie
1934

Woman in the Dark

Actor
Louise Loring
Movie
1934

One Sunday Afternoon

Actor
Virginia "Virgie" Brush Barnstead
Movie
1933

King KongStream

Actor
Ann Darrow
Series
1933
97%

Mystery of the Wax Museum

Actor
Charlotte Duncan
Movie
1933
92%

Below the Sea

Actor
Diana Templeton
Movie
1933

The Vampire Bat

Actor
Ruth Bertin
Movie
1933

The Woman I Stole

Actor
Vida Carew
Movie
1933

Ann Carver's Profession

Actor
Ann Carver
Movie
1933

The Bowery

Actor
Lucy Calhoun
Movie
1933

Doctor X

Actor
Joanne Xavier
Movie
1932

The Most Dangerous GameStream

Actor
Eve Trowbridge
Movie
1932
100%

The Finger Points

Actor
Marcia Collins
Movie
1931

Not Exactly Gentlemen

Actor
Lee Carleton
Movie
1931

The Unholy Garden

Actor
Camille de Jonghe
Movie
1931

Dirigible

Actor
Helen Pierce
Movie
1931

Captain Thunder

Actor
Ynez
Movie
1931

The Conquering Horde

Actor
Taisie Lockhart
Movie
1931

The Border Legion

Actor
Joan Randall
Movie
1930

The Texan

Actor
Consuelo
Movie
1930

Behind the Makeup

Actor
Marie Gardoni
Movie
1930

The Sea God

Actor
Daisy
Movie
1930

Four Feathers

Actor
Ethne Eustace
Movie
1929

Thunderbolt

Actor
Ritzy
Movie
1929

Pointed Heels

Actor
Lora Nixon
Movie
1929

The Legion of the Condemned

Actor
Christine Charteris
Movie
1928

The Wedding March

Actor
Mitzi Schrammell
Movie
1928

The Wild Horse Stampede

Actor
Jessie Hayden
Movie
1926

Chasing the Chaser

Actor
Nursemaid
Movie
1925

The Coast Patrol

Actor
Beth Slocum
Movie
1925

Just a Good Guy

Actor
Girl Entering Taxi
Movie
1924