The little girl born in Cardston, Alberta will forever be remembered as the girl dangling from the top of the Empire State Building in the movie King Kong.
Her first brush with show business came at Hollywood High where she appeared in the annual Pilgrimage Play. Armed with resumes and photos, she began to make the rounds looking for work in silent films. At the age of 16, Fay played a small role in Gasoline Love. It would be another two years before she would find work in a film appearing in The Coast Patrol
When Erich von Stroheim cast her as Mitzi in his film The Wedding March, it changed her life. The role remained her personal favourite and the one in which she felt she most fully expressed herself.
Paramount would showcase her in The Street of Sin and Legion of the Condemned with a young Gary Cooper. She starred in her first talkie, Josef von Sternberg’s Thunderbolt, in 1929.
Other roles followed, but it was the 1933 classic King Kong that solidified her as a Hollywood legend. The film would save RKO Studios and be named one of the 100 greatest films of all time by the American Film Institute in 1998.
She made eleven more films in 1934 including Once To Every Woman, Viva Villa! and Bulldog Jack. Wray retired for many years after Not a Ladies Man in 1942 and returned in 1953 to co-star in the TV sitcom Pride of the Family. She made a film comeback in character roles, appearing as philandering psychiatrist Charles Boyer’s long-suffering wife in The Cobweb. Her last acting appearance was as Henry Fonda’s sister in the 1980 television movie Gideon’s Trumpet.
