Fay Wray, Beauty to Kong's Beast, Dies at 96

Fay Wray, an actress who appeared in about 100 movies but whose fame is inextricably linked with the hours she spent struggling helplessly screaming in the eight-foot-hand of King Kong, died on Sunday night at her apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She was 96.

The huge success of "King Kong," a beauty-and-the beast film that opened in New York at both Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy in 1933, led to roles for Miss Wray in other 1930's films in which her life or her virtue, or both, were imperiled: "Dr. X," "The Mystery of the Wax Museum," "The Vampire Bat" and "The Most Dangerous Game."

But she was always aware that she would be remembered for the culmination of "King Kong," in which the giant ape from Skull Island carries her to the top of the Empire State Building, gently places her on a ledge, lunges furiously at fighter planes peppering him with bullets and falls to his death from the 102-story skyscraper, his strength and power neutralized by love. "When I'm in New York," the actress wrote in The New York Times in 1969, "I look at the building and feel as though it belongs to me, or is it vice versa?"

The most hazardous part of filming "King Kong," Miss Wray recalled, was the tendency of the giant gorilla hand to loosen its grasp while she was suspended high above the set. When she felt she was about to fall, she implored the director, Merian C. Cooper, to have her lowered to the stage floor to rest a few minutes before being secured once again in the hand and sent aloft.

She spent an entire day recording additional screams, variously shrill and plaintive, that an editor later inserted in the soundtrack — too often, she later emphasized. Asked how she was able to muster such animated cries, she replied, "I made myself believe that the nearest possible hope of rescue was at least a mile away."

Over the years, Miss Wray said, she came to feel that Kong had "become a spiritual thing to many people, including me."

"Although he had tremendous strength and power to destroy, some kind of instinct made him appreciate what he saw as beautiful," she said in a 1993 interview. "Just before he dies, he reaches toward me, but can't quite reach. The movie affects males of all ages. Recently, a 6-year-old boy said to me, `I've been waiting to meet you for half my life.' "

In a 1987 interview, Miss Wray said she had been sent a script for the 1976 remake of "King Kong," in which Jessica Lange played Kong's co-star, because its producers wanted her to play a small role. She said she disliked the script and declined the offer, because "the film I made was so extraordinary, so full of imagination and special effects, that it will never be equaled."

Fay Wray was born on Sept. 15, 1907, on a farm in Alberta, Canada, the daughter of Jerry Wray, an inventor, and his wife, Vina. The couple separated when Fay was 12, and her mother moved to Los Angeles with her five children. As a teen-ager, Miss Wray began acting in bit parts in movies, then won supporting roles.

After graduating from Hollywood High School, she was the ingénue in a half-dozen silent westerns and played the bride in Erich von Stroheim's 1928 silent classic "The Wedding March." Among her prominent sound films were "The Four Feathers" (1929), "Dirigible" (1931), "One Sunday Afternoon" (1933), "Viva Villa!" (1934) and "The Affairs of Cellini" (1934).

Miss Wray was always drawn to writers, as she recounted in her 1989 autobiography, "On the Other Hand." She was just 19 when she married John Monk Saunders, a Rhodes scholar and screenwriter known for films like "Wings" and "The Dawn Patrol." Miss Wray recalled that her husband "had this theme in his life of living dangerously and dying young." He was a womanizer, an alcoholic and a drug addict, and she divorced him, she said, after he injected her with drugs while she slept, sold their house and their furniture and kept the money, and disappeared for a time with their baby daughter, Susan. During the 11 years they were married, Miss Wray and her husband each earned half a million dollars, but nothing was left. Mr. Saunders hanged himself in 1940, at 43.

She was pursued by Sinclair Lewis and had a long romance with Clifford Odets. In 1942, she was married to Robert Riskin, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of "It Happened One Night," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," and "Lost Horizon." They had two children, Vicki and Robert Jr., who survive her, as does her daughter Susan. Mr. Riskin had a stroke in 1950 and died five years later. In 1971, she married Dr. Sanford Rothenberg, a neurosurgeon who had been one of Mr. Riskin's doctors. Dr. Rothenberg died in 1991.

Miss Wray retired in 1942, but made occasional movies in the 1950's and starred in "Gideon's Trumpet," a 1979 film with Henry Fonda. On television, she starred in a situation comedy, "The Pride of the Family," from 1953 to 1955. In later years, she also wrote plays that were produced in regional theaters.

When Aljean Harmetz of The New York Times visited her in 1989, she found Miss Wray, then 81, a "cheery woman, a mother hen with black leather pumps, pearls at the throat, a splash of bright red lipstick and auburn hair."

Miss Wray said: "I find it not acceptable when people blame Hollywood for the things that happened to them. Films are wonderful. I've had a beautiful life because of films."

The thing for me is "we know it's fake, does it look cool".

Stop motion animation was only ever done in the film by a relatively small number of special effects people so a lot the technique is consistently applied.

Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien (and later Dave Allen) all were able to put some personality into their sculptures and in the movements they gave the figures.

The skeletons in Jason & the Argonauts, Kong, et al may look "fake" but it's a good fake. With computer editing, motion blur could even be added now (and matting is much better than in old days).

I think that the bigger factor is cost (although computers aren't cheap).

I will say that Gollum in the second LOTR movie approaches the sophistication of stop motion animation dazzle. I still haven't seen the third film (missed it in the theaters and am waiting for the extended DVD).

I don't have high hopes for 21st Century Kong (Jack Black and others in the cast strike me as populism over ability).

This is the original 1933 movie review from the NY Times. Check out the bit I bolded. Sub-literacy amongst journalists is older then we thought. KING KONG By MORDAUNT HALL Published: March 3, 1933 At both the Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy, which have a combined seating capacity of 10,000, the main attraction now is a fantastic film known as King Kong. The story of this feature was begun by the late Edgar Wallace and finished by Merian C. Cooper, who with his old associate, Ernest B. Schoedsack, is responsible for the production. It essays to give the spectator a vivid conception of the terrifying experiences of a producer of jungle pictures and his colleagues, who capture a gigantic ape, something like fifty feet tall, and bring it to New York. The narrative is worked out in a decidedly compelling fashion, which is mindful of what was done in the old silent film The Lost World. Through multiple exposures, processed "shots," and a variety of angles of camera wizardry, the producers set forth an adequate story and furnish enough thrills for any devotee of such tales. Although there are vivid battles between prehistoric monsters on the island which Denham, the picturemaker, insists on visiting, it is when the enormous ape, called Kong, is brought to this city that the excitement reaches its highest pitch. Imagine a fifty-foot beast with a girl in one paw climbing up the outside of the Empire State Building, and after putting the girl on a ledge, clutching at airplanes, the pilots of which are pouring bullets from machine guns into the monster's body. It often seems as though Ann Redman, who goes through more terror than any of the other characters in the film, would faint, but she always appears to be able to scream. Her body is like a doll in the claw of the gigantic beast, who in the course of his wanderings through Manhattan tears down a section of the elevated railroad and tosses a car filled with passengers to the street. Automobiles are mere missiles for this Kong, who occasionally reveals that he relishes his invincibility by patting his chest. Denham is an intrepid person, but it is presumed that when the ape is killed he has had quite enough of searching for places with strange monsters. In the opening episode he is about to leave on the freighter for the island supposed to have been discovered by some sailor, when he goes ashore to find a girl whom he wants to act in his picture. In course of time he espies Ann, played by the attractive Fay Wray, and there ensues a happy voyage. Finally, through the fog, the island is sighted and Denham, the ship's officers and sailors, all armed, go ashore. It soon develops that the savages, who offer up sacrifices in the form of human beings to Kong, their super-king, keep him in an area surrounded by a great wall. Kong has miles in which to roam and fight with brontosauri and dinosauri and other huge creatures. There is a door to the wall. After Denham and the others from the ship have had quite enough of the island, Kong succeeds in bursting open the door, but he is captured through gas bombs hurled at him by the white men. How they ever get him on the vessel is not explained, for the next thing you know is that Kong is on exhibition in Gotham, presumably in Madison Square Garden. During certain episodes in this film Kong, with Ann in his paw, goes about his battles, sometimes putting her on a fifty-foot high tree branch while he polishes off an adversary. When he is perceived on exhibition in New York he is a frightening spectacle, but Denham thinks that he has the beast safely shackled. The newspaper photographers irritate even him with their flashlights, and after several efforts he breaks the steel bands and eventually gets away. He looks for Ann on the highways and byways of New York. He climbs up hotel façades and his head fills a whole window, his white teeth and red mouth adding to the terror of the spectacle. Everywhere he moves he crushes out lives. He finally discovers Ann, and being a perspicacious ape, he decides that the safest place for himself and Ann is the tower of the Empire State structure. Needless to say that this picture was received by many a giggle to cover up fright. Constant exclamations issued from the Radio City Music Hall yesterday. "What a man!" observed one youth when the ape forced down the great oaken door on the island. Human beings seem so small that one is reminded of Defoe's Gulliver's Travels. One step and this beast traverses half a block. If buildings hinder his progress, he pushes them down, and below him the people look like Lilliputians. Miss Wray goes through her ordeal with great courage. Robert Armstrong gives a vigorous and compelling impersonation of Denham. Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher, Sam Hardy, Noble Johnson, and James Flavin add to the interest of this weird tale. KING KONG (MOVIE

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