Fay Wray

The Scream That Built an Industry

Vina Fay Wray was born on a ranch in Alberta in 1907. Nothing in that rural Canadian setting hinted that she would end up dangling from the hand of a giant gorilla thousands of miles away. Her family moved to the United States when she was a girl, and film became a practical career path for a young woman with her presence.

She started with tiny roles in low-budget comedy shorts. Her luck changed when she signed with Universal in 1926. Erich von Stroheim spotted her for The Wedding March. The shoot was a grueling, many-month ordeal that nearly wore out the producers' patience because of the director's excesses.

Stroheim was an obsessive genius.

That 1928 film gave her the standing she needed to survive the arrival of sound. Many actresses of her generation fell by the wayside because their voices didn't suit the primitive microphones of the era. Fay didn't have that problem, and her move to talkies was smooth and quick.

The Empire State Building's Golden Cage

In 1933 she shot King Kong under the direction of Merian C. Cooper. The director promised her she would work with the tallest and darkest leading man in Hollywood. She was thinking about Clark Gable. The reality was a model made of metal, wood, and rabbit fur at a special effects studio in Los Angeles.

She accepted the role for 10,000 dollars, a considerable sum at the time.

She spent weeks screaming at nothing on an empty set. The sound engineer recorded her scream and edited it to sound higher-pitched and more desperate than normal. That sound became the standard for horror films for decades. But the ape's success proved to be a trap for her career.

The studios only wanted to see her suffer on screen after the premiere of the film. She starred in The Mystery of the Wax Museum and The Most Dangerous Game almost at the same time. She worked at a frantic pace to pay off her first husband's debts, screenwriter John Monk Saunders. He was a brilliant man but had serious addiction problems.

The industry typecast her without mercy.

By the late 30s, her contract with the major studios had expired. She began working as a freelancer, which meant taking B-movies with laughable budgets. She shot in England and returned to California to try to reclaim her place in drama, but audiences had already pegged her as a professional victim.

The Final Silence in New York

She stepped away from the cameras in 1942 to focus on her family and her children. But television brought her back in the 50s. She appeared in The Pride of the Family and had brief film appearances until she fully retired. In 1989, she published her autobiography, By Myself, in which she settled scores with her own legend.

Peter Jackson tried to persuade her to make a cameo in his version of King Kong from 2005. Fay gracefully turned down the offer because she didn't want to interfere with the new vision of the myth. So the director had to settle for including a mention of her character in the original script.

She died in her Fifth Avenue apartment on August 8, 2004. Two days later, the lights of the Empire State Building went dark for exactly fifteen minutes in her honor. The skyscraper's usual lighting returned at 9:15 p.m.