King Kong actress Fay Wray dies

Fay Wray, who won everlasting fame as the damsel held atop the Empire State Building by the giant ape in the 1933 film classic King Kong, has died at 96.

Wray died on Sunday at her Manhattan flat, said Rick McKay, a friend and director of the last film she appeared in. There was no official cause of death.

“She just kind of drifted off quietly as if she was going to sleep,” said McKay, director of the documentary Broadway: The Golden Age. “She just kind of gave out.”

During a career that started in 1923, Wray appeared with such stars as Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy, but she was destined to be linked with the rampaging Kong in movie fans’ minds.

“I used to resent King Kong,” she remarked in a 1963 interview. “But now I don’t fight it anymore. I realise that it is a classic, and I am pleased to be associated with it. Why, only recently an entire issue of a French magazine was devoted to discussing the picture from its artistic, moral and even religious aspects.”

She wrote in her 1988 autobiography, On The Other Hand: “Each time I arrive in New York and see the skyline and the exquisite beauty of the Empire State Building, my heart beats a little faster. I like that feeling. I really like it!”

King Kong obscured the other notable films Wray made during the 1930s. They included adventures The Four Feathers and Viva Villa, westerns The Texan and The Conquering Horde, romances One Sunday Afternoon and The Unholy Garden, as well as horror films Dr X and The Mystery Of The Wax Museum.

After appearing in Erich von Stroheim’s 1928 silent The Wedding March, playing a poor Viennese girl abandoned by her lover, Wray became a much-employed leading lady.

In 1933, the year of King Kong, she appeared in 11 films, co-starring with Beery, George Raft, Cooper, Jack Holt and others.

In her autobiography, the actress recalled that she had been paid around €9,000 for King Kong but her 10 weeks’ work was stretched over a 10-month period.

Although Kong appeared huge, the full figure was really only 18 inches tall. Wray knew him by a separate arm, which was 8 feet long.

“I would stand on the floor,” she recalled, “and they would bring this arm down and cinch it around my waist, then pull me up in the air. Every time I moved, one of the fingers would loosen, so it would look like I was trying to get away. Actually, I was trying not to slip through his hand.”

By the late 30s, the actress was appearing in low-budget films, and she gave up working in 1942 to be a wife and mother. Her first husband was John Monk Saunders, who wrote such air films as Wings and The Dawn Patrol.

She was 19 and he was 30 when they married, but they divorced and she married Robert Riskin, the writer of It Happened One Night, Lost Horizon and other Frank Capra films. In 1950, he suffered a stroke and died five years later.

Returning to work in 1953, Wray appeared mostly in motherly roles in youth-oriented films like Small Town Girl, Tammy And The Bachelor and Summer Love. In 1979 she played opposite Henry Fonda in a TV drama, Gideon’s Trumpet.