King Kong actress Wray dies, aged 96

The Empire State Building - the skyscraper that King Kong scaled while holding tight to Fay Wray - yesterday dimmed its lights for 15 minutes in honour of the actress who died on Sunday.

Wray died quietly in her sleep at her Manhattan apartment, said Rick McKay, a friend and director of the 2003 documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, the last film she appeared in. She was 96.

Wray tried to wrestle free from the giant gorilla’s grip onscreen in the 1933 classic King Kong. In the years that followed, she yearned to shake the ape’s prestigious shadow.

“I used to resent King Kong,” she said in an 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.”

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

Her other films included adventures like The Four Feathers and Viva Villa; Westerns such as The Texan and The Conquering Horde; romances such as One Sunday Afternoon and The Unholy Garden; as well as the horror films Dr X and The Mystery of the Wax Museum.

After appearing in director 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.

In 1980, she told of her dissatisfaction with roles of that period: “Leading ladies were not supposed to be funny but were supposed to stand there and look beautiful. That was frustrating as an actress.”

In King Kong, she plays an unemployed actress who agrees to take a job with a movie company that is going on location to a mysterious island inhabited by the huge ape.

When the film company discovers him, Kong is attracted to Wray and abducts her. But he is eventually captured and put on display in New York. Kong escapes and finds Wray, with terrifying results, but eventually meets his death on the Empire State Building.

In her 1988 autobiography, On the Other Hand, Wray wrote of Kong: “He is a very real and individual entity. He has a personality, a character that has been compelling to many different people for many different reasons and viewpoints.”

The actress recalled that she was paid $10,000 for her work on 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 spent her time with its fake 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.”

Wray quit working in 1942. Her first husband was screenwriter John Monk Saunders. After they divorced, 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 films such as Small Town Girl, Tammy and the Bachelor and Summer Love. Sixteen years after Riskin’s death, she married his physician, Dr Sanford Rothenberg, who died in 1991.

Wray stayed active in recent years, touring the globe to promote The Wedding March when it was reissued in 1998 and flying to Los Angeles for her grandson’s wedding just weeks ago. She was working on a sequel to her autobiography, McKay said.

Wray is survived by two daughters and a son.