In August 2004, the lights atop New York City’s Empire State Building went dark for fifteen minutes, an unprecedented tribute to a ninety-six-year-old actress whose on-screen screams on that very skyscraper had electrified audiences seven decades earlier. Fay Wray, the wide-eyed blonde immortalized as King Kong’s captive, had lived a life as towering as the giant ape that lifted her into movie lore. She was best known as the screen queen who gave a soul to a gargantuan beast, but Wray in fact had a prolific career and a personal journey filled with resilience, scandal, and a surprising second act. Wray was born on September 15, 1907, on a ranch near Cardston, Alberta, Canada, one of six children.
Her father was an English-born rancher; her mother was American. The family’s circumstances were humble and often unstable. When Fay was still a child, her father fell on hard times financially, prompting the family to move south to the United States, first to Arizona and later to Salt Lake City, Utah. There, Wray grew up in a poor Mormon household, experiencing a hardscrabble early life.
Tragedy struck early when one of her elder sisters died of influenza in childhood, a loss that made her mother especially protective. Concerned for Fay’s frail health and seeking better opportunities, her mother allowed a family friend, a photographer, to escort the photogenic fourteen-year-old to Los Angeles in 1922. Hollywood was already luring dreamers from all over, and the wide-eyed Canadian teenager arrived with hopes of breaking into the movies. By her mid-teens, Wray was attending Hollywood High School and catching the acting bug.
Her timing was fortuitous. Silent films were all the rage in the 1920s, and studios were in constant need of fresh faces. She landed her first role as a teenager in a short comedy called Gasoline Love in 1923. Though just a bit part, it was a start.
Over the next few years, Wray picked up extra and minor roles, steadily learning the craft on set. In 1926, her promise was recognized when she was named one of the year’s WAMPAS Baby Stars, a promotional award singling out young actresses deemed most likely to succeed. Other honorees that year included future luminaries like Joan Crawford, Mary Astor, and Dolores del Río. The accolade raised her profile and soon led to a contract at Universal Pictures, where she appeared in low-budget westerns and melodramas.
In 1927, Paramount Pictures signed the nineteen-year-old to a contract. True stardom would come with a visionary, if unconventional, project. Famed director Erich von Stroheim, known for his obsessive attention to detail, cast Wray as the lead in his silent epic The Wedding March in 1928. It was her first major starring role.
Wray played Mitzi, a poor Viennese girl romanced by a prince in the lavish melodrama. Winning the role had not been easy. Von Stroheim initially doubted Wray because at five-foot-three she was too young and too tall for his taste, and she was naturally brunette when he envisioned a blonde. Determined to impress, the young actress showed up to her audition with her hair piled high and wearing her finest dress.
Still unconvinced, von Stroheim put her through a grueling series of screen tests and even brought her to tears before finally giving her the part. It was worth it. Under von Stroheim’s exacting direction, Wray blossomed. She later recalled being in awe of the director’s artistic rigor.
When The Wedding March ran wildly over budget and was cut down by the studio, becoming a notorious financial flop, it nevertheless remained a silent-era classic, and Wray’s performance won praise. More importantly for Fay, the film became a point of personal pride, and she counted her work with von Stroheim among her finest achievements, later saying the Mitzi role was one of the few in her career that truly showcased her talent to its fullest. Around the same time her career was taking off, Wray’s personal life was undergoing a plot twist of its own. In 1928, at just twenty years old, she married a rising screenwriter named John Monk Saunders.
Saunders was dashing, highly educated, and talented: he wrote the story for Wings, the World War I aviation drama that became the first film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. To outsiders, the pairing looked like a golden Hollywood union. They even collaborated professionally, with Saunders writing a Broadway musical in 1931 called Nikki in which she starred. They had a daughter together, but the marriage would soon plunge Wray into emotional turmoil.
Saunders had a dark side. He was a heavy drinker, haunted by personal demons, and chronically unfaithful. For years, Wray endured his infidelities and attempts to control her finances. The situation spiraled as Saunders squandered her hard-earned money on drinking binges and affairs.
By the late 1930s, after more than a decade of marriage, Wray had reached her limit. In 1939, she filed for divorce. Shortly after, Saunders committed a final cruel act: in an unstable state, he kidnapped their young daughter, leaving Wray frantic. Mother and child were safely reunited, but the incident was a chilling capstone to an abusive relationship.
In 1940, not long after losing Wray, Saunders died by suicide, a tragic epilogue that left Wray with complex grief and guilt. Even as her first marriage was crumbling, Wray’s acting career in the early 1930s was hitting a remarkable stride. The dawn of the talkies had upended many silent-era careers, but Wray navigated the transition with ease. By 1932, she had established a niche as Hollywood’s leading lady of the macabre, helped not just by the clarity of her voice but by the astonishing pitch and power of her scream.
That year she starred in Dr. X opposite Lionel Atwill, earning the nickname Scream Queen. She screamed again in The Vampire Bat and Mystery of the Wax Museum, two more horror thrillers from 1933. All the while, Wray was under contract with RKO Radio Pictures, which recognized that her blend of delicate beauty and lung power was a box-office asset.
RKO also cast her in The Most Dangerous Game, about a sadistic hunter preying on shipwreck survivors on a jungle island. It was on the set of The Most Dangerous Game that Wray unknowingly stepped into cinematic immortality. The film’s co-directors, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B.
Schoedsack, were simultaneously preparing another, more ambitious RKO project, even reusing the same jungle sets at night. Cooper, an adventure filmmaker with a wild imagination, had co-written a screenplay about a giant prehistoric ape on the loose in modern-day Manhattan. Impressed by Wray’s ability to convey both vulnerability and pluck, he offered her the female lead, assuring the twenty-five-year-old actress it would make her a star. Cooper teased his prospective leading lady with a cryptic promise: she was going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.
She later admitted she imagined someone like Cary Grant or Clark Gable, only to learn Cooper meant a twenty-five-foot gorilla. The project’s working title kept changing, but eventually they settled on a name that would echo through film history: King Kong. Filming King Kong in 1932 was an exhaustive, unorthodox endeavor. The production blended stop-motion animation for the giant ape with live actors, meaning Wray often performed her most intense scenes reacting to empty space or a large prop.
In one harrowing sequence, her character, aspiring actress Ann Darrow, is offered as a sacrifice to Kong and finds herself in his enormous paw. On set, this was achieved with a massive mechanical hand built to clutch Wray and lift her thirty feet into the air. She gamely endured multiple takes being jostled in the contraption, her only direction being to shriek in terror. Her vocal performance became one of the most famous ever captured on film, a primal scream of such pitch and persistence that it defined the archetype of the movie damsel in distress.
Off camera, Wray was skeptical about the film that would come to define her. In later years, she admitted that when King Kong was about to premiere in 1933, she feared the sensational adventure was not Shakespeare and might undermine her credibility as a serious actress. But Cooper’s extravagant vision paid off. Audiences didn’t want Shakespeare in 1933.
They wanted to be paralyzed with fear, and that is exactly what King Kong provided. When King Kong opened in the spring of 1933, it was a phenomenon. Depression-era audiences flocked to see the spectacle of beauty and beast atop the Empire State Building. RKO earned nearly ninety thousand dollars in the film’s first four days, a staggering sum at a time when tickets cost fifteen cents.
Contemporary audiences were shocked by the film’s realism and sheer ferocity. Reports from the era describe viewers screaming, fainting, and even fleeing the theater. One famous anecdote, likely embellished over time, claims some New York moviegoers dashed from the theater in panic, believing the events were real. King Kong was not just a monster movie; it was a cultural shock wave that recalibrated what screen terror could be.
For years, Wray resisted being defined by that single role. She even wore a brunette wig in other films to avoid being recognized as the blonde who lived through King Kong. But eventually, she made peace with her fate. She came to appreciate that Kong had given her a kind of immortality that serious dramas never could.
She wrote a tongue-in-cheek open letter to the big ape in her memoir, acknowledging that to speak of me is to think of you. What sometimes gets lost in the glare of King Kong’s spotlight is that Wray was much more than a one-role wonder. In 1933, the year Kong roared into theaters, Wray appeared in eleven films, holding her own opposite top leading men of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Yet none of those performances would be as indelible as Ann Darrow.
In the wake of King Kong’s success, Wray found herself typecast as a scream specialist. She dutifully continued to work at a frenetic pace, but truly prestigious projects eluded her. By the end of the 1930s, as she entered her early thirties, her film stardom was already beginning to wane. In 1940, at a party in Los Angeles, Wray was introduced to Robert Riskin, one of Hollywood’s elite screenwriters.
Riskin was Frank Capra’s favored collaborator and had penned the script for It Happened One Night, for which he won an Academy Award, as well as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Where Saunders had been mercurial and wounding, Riskin was warm, gentlemanly, and steady. The chemistry between them was immediate.
Wray married Riskin in 1942 in the midst of World War II. The wedding was not only a new chapter in her personal life but also a conscious turning point in her career. She retired from film acting that year, walking away from Hollywood to focus on her marriage and growing family. They welcomed two children, and Riskin formally adopted Susan, making a happy family of five.
Over the course of their courtship and marriage, Riskin composed more than one hundred love letters to Wray, eloquent missives she treasured always. Yet fate dealt the couple a cruel blow. In 1950, Riskin suffered a catastrophic stroke. The once-indefatigable storyteller was left partially paralyzed and unable to work.
With three young children and a disabled spouse, Wray realized she had to step back into the workforce. In 1953, she accepted her first film role in ten years, a supporting part in Treasure of the Golden Condor. She also made television appearances and starred in an ABC sitcom called The Pride of the Family, playing a housewife opposite a young Natalie Wood. Juggling work and home, Wray effectively became the family breadwinner.
Riskin lived for five years after his stroke, and in September 1955, he died with Wray by his side. He was fifty-seven. Wray was now a widow at forty-eight, the single mother of three. After a brief return to steady film roles in the 1950s, including a turn in the 1955 noir Crime of Passion, she again stepped back from acting.
By the 1960s, she had largely retired for good, moving to New York City. In 1971, she found love once more, marrying a respected neurosurgeon, Dr. Sanford Sandy Rothenberg. It was a quieter union, and Wray relished the normalcy.
In her final decades, Wray returned in her own fashion to the public stage. In 1973, she published a candid autobiography, On the Other Hand: A Life Story. The title itself was a witty nod to King Kong, a reference to how Kong’s other hand had held her so famously aloft. The launch party for the memoir was held on the eighty-sixth floor observatory of the Empire State Building, the very perch from which Kong met his end.
In the 1980s and 90s, a wave of nostalgia for classic Hollywood carried her gracefully. She received a Women in Film Crystal Award, earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and at the 70th Academy Awards ceremony in 1998, she made a surprise appearance with host Billy Crystal, prompting a standing ovation. In early 2004, director Peter Jackson, deep into production on his lavish remake of King Kong, reached out to Fay with an invitation. Jackson and actress Naomi Watts, cast as Ann Darrow in the remake, met with Wray in New York, hoping to persuade her to appear in a cameo.
Wray twinklingly teased Watts, telling the younger actress, You’re not Ann, I’m Ann. Ultimately, she declined. On August 8, 2004, Fay Wray passed away peacefully in her sleep at her Manhattan apartment. She was ninety-six years old.
Two days after her death, the Empire State Building dimmed its storied lights at midnight, casting the city skyline into momentary darkness in memory of a woman whose impassioned performance over seventy years before had given the landmark new meaning. Wray’s daughter, Victoria, remarked that the tribute was perfect; her mother had always maintained a special bond with that building. Those who knew her described Wray as unpretentious and kind, utterly devoid of diva airs. She had lived long enough to see movies evolve from silent black-and-white reels to digital blockbusters, and King Kong, that risky project she took on in 1932, continued to tower in the popular imagination.
A diminutive figure in a torn dress, cradled in the hand of an oddly sympathetic movie monster, screaming for dear life yet somehow never losing her humanity, her legacy never faded as long as stories are told and screamed on screen.