A woman’s scream is heard as a giant ape’s hand bursts through a window.
As he attempts to grab her a man with her valiantly grabs a chair and swings at the hand.
He fails to make an impact and with a smack the ape sends the man to the ground leaving him unconscious.
Through the window the ape’s attention returns to the woman and his massive hand reaches towards her and grabs her from the bed.
She tries to fight against his iron grip as he pulls her to the window, but it is no use, the giant ape is far too strong.
Just as all feels lost, a voice from the shadows yells “CUT!”
The woman smiles as several people help her out of the confines of the immense hand.
The director says the scene was perfect.
In fact, it’s so good that once it’s released it becomes one of the most famous sequences in film history.
I’m Craig Baird and this is Canadian History Ehx!
Throughout this month, I am looking at the great Canadian actors who helped leave their mark on film and television.
Today we are journeying through Skull Island with the beauty who charmed the beast,
This is the story of…. Fay Wray!
In a small community located in the southwestern corner of Alberta you’ll find something truly unusual Even though it is thousands of kilometres away from the Empire State Building, King Kong lives in Cardston and in his hand is the most famous person to come from there.
Fay Wray’ story begins on Sept. 15, 1907, as Vina Fay Wray, daughter to Elvina Marguerite Jones and Joseph Heber Wray.
Elvina’s father was Daniel Webster Jones, an American and Mormon pioneer. He was the leader of the group that colonized what eventually became Mesa, Arizona, made the first translation of selections of The Book of Mormon into Spanish, led the first Mormon missionary expedition into Mexico among other things.
He was immortalized in the Wallace Stegner poem, The Gathering Zion as The Man Who Ate the Pack Saddle.
That poem tells the story of how Daniel rescued 1,000 stranded Mormon settlers trapped in a blizzard. After the rescue he stayed behind with the settlers’ goods and endured a terrible winter.
Legend has it Daniel ate his saddle to stay alive.
Inspired by his exploits, Elvina also became accomplished individual. She graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in education and helped her father write his autobiography.
By the time she was twenty-two, she had married for the first time.
It was a loveless union but it lasted eight years until she met Joseph Wray whose wife had died in childbirth.
The two fell in love and Elvina left her husband for Joseph and the two left for Canada with his child.
They were both Mormons, so the decision to run away together was scandalous.
The couple arrived in Alberta and discovered cheap land and plenty of space to make a life for themselves.
They bought a 156-acre parcel near Cardston and built a beautiful two-storey home which had a gate at the front where John placed a beautiful carved stone with the property’s name.
Wrayland.
There the couple had four children Joseph, Vaida, Willow and finally Fay.
The ranch was successful, and the family lived well, but life was tough even for the hardiest of individuals.
Elvina fell into a deep depression, she felt alone and under stimulated on the prairie. Even trips into the small town of Cardston were far from what she was used to in Salt Lake City.
There were no mental health services in those days, and women were expected to put on a brave face.
Some, like Elvina, simply couldn’t do that.
Eventually, Joseph sent his wife to a mental asylum in Manitoba, and the good years came to an end.
The family then began a downward spiral that would last over a decade.
Unable, or unwilling, to raise the family on his own, Joseph sent his children to various homes in the area.
Fay ended up living with Dr. Stackpoole’s family.
Several years went by and when Elvina was released from the asylum, she arrived in Cardston to discover her family was split apart.
She immediately gathered up her children to rebuild the life they once had.
But Joseph had other plans.
In 1910, he sold the ranch and sawmill in Alberta, and moved the family to Mesa, Arizona.
Wrayland came to an end.
In Arizona, the family struggled as the farm and ranch Joseph attempted to make work, didn’t.
After only two years, the family left for Salt Lake City.
The family’s hardships followed them.
A sixth child was born, Victor and to pay for his delivery Elvina had to give the doctor her wedding ring.
Meanwhile, Joseph was frequently away for work and what little income he made he sent home.
But it was never enough, and Elvina and the children often took odd jobs to pay the bills.
Fay said her stomach often growled with hunger.
After three years in Salt Lake City, Joseph got a job as a night watchman at a mine in Lark, Utah.
Once again, the family picked up and moved to the company town.
Lark was even more isolated and desolate than Cardston, and already on its way to becoming a ghost town.
But it did have one thing…
A local pool hall which was transformed into something magical for Fay.
A place to first experience films.
This is where a projector, bed sheet, and piano player accompanied silent films by Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and fellow Canadian Mary Pickford.
Fay didn’t know it then, but she would rub elbows with them in the future.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First Fay had to survive childhood.
The mill in Lark burned down in 1917, and Joseph became unemployed.
When Joseph left to find work, Elvina and the children did not follow, instead, they moved back to Salt Lake City.
Elvina had grown tired of being uprooted every few years and the constant struggles.
She also had never forgiven Joseph for sending her to an asylum and for splitting up her kids while she was away.
Elvina would forge forward on her own and from then on Fay only saw her father twice.
And I mean literally saw him.
Both times he stood on the road, staring at the house.
He never tried to knock on the door, and Fay never told her mother.
To survive the family took any jobs they could, including sewing dresses and folding Christmas advertisements for companies.
But in the struggle, they started to feel a sense of stability, even if their stomachs still growled from hunger.
But it wouldn’t last.
It would become a pattern that repeated many times throughout her life.
Stability and the semblance of happiness was too often interrupted by tragedy.
This time was because of the Spanish Flu that spread like wildfire in 1918 and left fifty million were dead.
Including Fay’s sister Vaida. Her death devastated the family.
They had worked so hard to build a life for themselves, only to have the disease tear them apart.
And yet they persisted.
In 1920, Fay won the chance to do a screen test after selling the most newspaper subscriptions for the Salt Lake Telegram. I
It was just a quick shot of her holding a bouquet of roses and sitting on a horse and it played once at a local theatre.
But when Fay saw herself projected onto the screen and she was immediately hooked.
She might have been interested in the silver screen but how would a poor girl from Salt Lake City ever make it to Hollywood?
It seemed too far-fetched if it weren’t for her 15-year-old sister.
One day, Willow, brought home her new boyfriend, 21-year-old William Mortenson.
He was a photographer and artist and over the course of several visits over several weeks he charmed the family with stories of European travels.
Soon, Willow announced that she and William were engaged, although no proposal had been made.
William then dropped his own bombshell announcement.
He was going to Hollywood.
And that wasn’t it all.
He wouldn’t be going alone.
He wanted to bring Fay with him to help her get her start in the movie industry.
There was no mention of Willow in his plans.
The family was surprised by this announcement.
And other than Willow no one was more surprised than Fay.
She had not discussed anything with William.
And the surprises would keep coming because her mother then agreed to the unusual arrangement.
The next day, the 14-year-old Fay Wray left Utah accompanied by William Mortenson who was seven years her senior.
The two made their way to California by train, and if you think William plotted this scheme out of the goodness of his heart…. Well… I have some bad news for you.
William upped the creep factor by telling Fay he loved her, and not Willow.
It was just about to get worse because on the first night in Hollywood they stayed in separate rooms in a rooming house but then in the middle of the night William crept into Fay’s room and slept next to her as she stared at the ceiling.
The following day, he moved her into the home of a family he knew.
For the next few weeks, William took her to various studios and introduced her to a few producers he knew.
And if you weren’t creeped out by William’s antics with Fay you will be by what one producer did when they stayed at his home over a weekend.
Her tried to get into Fay’s room in the middle of the night too.
But this time she had been prepared and placed a heavy dresser in front of the locked door to prevent anyone from getting inside.
These predatory accounts can be found in a book by her future daughter, Victoria, which also recounts another time William entered her room without permission and ran his hands over her body while she sat there, afraid to move.
The horrific accounts she relayed may have only been a few, but we have no real way of knowing for sure what she experienced.
What we do know is that after a year of living in Los Angeles, Fay’s mother and siblings arrived unexpectedly.
Elvina said she had visited a spiritualist who told her that William was dangerous and that she needed to get to Los Angeles immediately.
Fay was delighted to have her family with her again.
Feeling excited Fay told her mother that William had taken her to the beach one day to take photos of her in a swimsuit to help her get roles.
Elvina, naturally, was livid.
She stormed into William’s studio and demanded that every negative he had of her daughter be given to her.
Once he handed them over, she smashed each one to pieces.
Elvina told her daughter she was never to see William again.
Unfortunately, she also blamed Fay for the entire situation.
Which was interesting considering she was the one who had given William permission to take her barely teenage daughter to live in another state.
Out of anger, and in an attempt to protect her daughter, Elvina pulled Fay out of school and kept her at home under lock and key.
After the Board of Education intervened, Fay returned to school and was able to participate in school plays.
One day, while out on a walk with her mother, Fay was approached by representatives from Century Studios.
They told her they had seen her in a small role as a clown and wanted to give her a part in their next movie.
That small role led to another role, which spawned another, as her confidence slowly grew.
That led to a visit to Hal Roach Studios where she asked for any job they had and instead walked out with a six-month contract.
As her film career picked up, Fay dropped out of school, and borrowed money to buy a Model T, to make daily trips to the studio.
By the time she was sixteen, she was making $75 per week, or about $1,200 today and she became the family’s breadwinner.
Once her contract with Hal Roach was up, she moved over to Universal Studios where she worked six days a week, often filming a new movie every day.
In 1926, she was considered to be one of the actresses on the cusp of becoming stars by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers Baby Stars that same year, Fay was cast in her biggest movie yet, The Wedding March.
Directed by Erich von Stroheim, who also starred in it, the movie follows Nicki, a Hapsburg Prince, and an innkeeper’s daughter, played by Fay who become star crossed love interests.
The story ends with Fay’s character marrying a butcher to stop him from killing Nicki, while Nicki marries the daughter of a rich factory owner to help his family.
The film was shot over six months and cost $1.25 million to make, an astounding sum for the time.
It was also over budget and took almost a year to edit the 60 km of film down to one movie. That delay proved to be disastrous.
On Oct. 6, 1927, The Jazz Singer was released.
It was the first talkie, and it was the first and final nail in the coffin for silent films. By the time the Wedding March was released a year to the day of the Jazz Singer, and two years after it was filmed audiences had moved on from silent films and it bombed at the box office. But Fay Wray was unscathed by the failure.
This had been her first leading role, and she was now in demand. In 1929, she starred in three films, The Four Feathers, Thunderbolt and Pointed Heels. All three did well at the box office.
She was also critically acclaimed and with that came fame. Paramount signed her to a three-year contract at $500 per week which allowed her to buy a new Hollywood home where her mother, brothers, sister, and niece all lived.
The home also had a grand piano and full-time cook.
The Paramount contract not only changed her life professionally, but also personally.
One of the top screenwriters at the studio was John Saunders.
Just a few years earlier Paramount had purchased the rights to his unfinished novel Wings for the unheard-of sum of $39,000.
That film won the first Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed $1.1 million at the box office.
He went on to write The Legion of the Condemned which Fay was starring in and both were invited by Pat Powers producer of The Wedding March, to a gala evening at his home.
When they sat down next to each other John touched her arm during conversation and she said quote
“As he touched my arm, a current of sensory feeling went through me. I knew instinctively it meant there would be probably no turning away from him if his thoughts should turn towards me.”
End quote
The two began to spend more time together.
Fay was 19 years old and John was 30 and the two would be seen playing golf, tennis and skeet shooting as they socialized with some of his glamorous friends including Rudyard Kipling, the famous English journalist and novelist who authored the Jungle Book
The couple fell in love but that didn’t put a stop to John’s roaming eyes.
He didn’t hide it either.
Instead, he told Fay about the women he had been with including that he was having an affair with Bessie Laskey, the wife of Paramount co-founder Jesse Laskey.
It wasn’t a case of asking for forgiveness, he also never said he would stop.
Instead, he just informed her of what he was doing.
Even though he wasn’t discrete she agreed to marry him in 1928.
Soon after, she left for Maryland to film The First Kiss with Gary Cooper.
While she was away tragedy struck.
Her brother Vivien, a gifted poet who lived in her Hollywood home fell into a deep depression.
He was gay but struggled in a time when homosexuality was not accepted.
In the spring of 1928, Elvina sent him to live with family friends in Canada, hoping a change of scenery would do him well.
He never made it.
On June 4, 1928, near Lodi, California, Vivian jumped off the train and was crushed to death.
Fay was on set when she got the devastating news but powered through to finish the film.
As she dealt with the loss, John called her and told her he was miserable and immediately travelled to Maryland with Fay’s mother Elvina.
Almost as soon as he arrived, in a small church in St. Michael’s, Maryland, with Gary Cooper as a witness, Fay and John got married.
Just two years into her marriage Fay was nearly at the top of her game.
In 1930 alone, she appeared in seven films. Including her second one with Gary Cooper, The Texan and the two began to forge a deep friendship that would last decades.
But just as her star was on the rise a letter arrived informing her that her estranged father was dying of cancer.
Fay had not seen Joseph since she was a child in Utah, but he had followed her career and now lived in Los Angeles to be closer.
He died on May 5, 1930, and that’s when Fay received some poems he had written which expressed his loneliness and how deeply he missed his family.
Through the sadness her marriage to John continued strong.
The couple lived a life of parties and galas, where they were greeted as one of Hollywood’s favourites.
But the creep from her youth was also lurking, ready to snatch away any joy she could have.
William Mortenson’s photos he had taken of Fay as a teen found their way to a magazine. As a rising star, the magazine was more than happy to print the pictures to boost subscription.
In the pictures, Fay was barefoot, on a motorcycle, with bare legs and shoulders.
The accompanying story stated she had arrived in Hollywood with the much older William and shared sordid details that painted her in a horrible light. When news broke, John flew into a rage and accused her of being impure.
He also believed there were more photos that hadn’t been published. He used his rage and contempt for her as an excuse to research books and scripts out of town and in each new city, he found a lover.
Meanwhile she worried the scandal would derail her career.
As Fay worried about her marriage and career, she turned to one of her friends, the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper.
The two had worked together in The Four Feathers in 1929, and she enjoyed collaborating with the director.
He told her that he had been working on a project since they first met.
He had read W. Douglas Burden’s book The Dragon Lizards of Komodo and it sparked for a film in which a gorilla fights giant lizards.
It eventually morphed into a beauty and the beast scenario. But to turn his idea into something special he had hired prolific British writer Edgar Wallace in December 1931.
For the next year, Wallace worked on the script, with Cooper, and added scenes in New York, and a jungle chase scene.
Wallace presented his finished script for King Kong in January of 1932, but he died a month later of diabetes and double pneumonia.
Cooper brought in James Creelman to polish the screenplay, but his version was far too dark, so he brought in Ruth Rose.
She had never written a script before, but Cooper had faith in her.
She removed several instances of sexual assault, improved the dialogue, and fine-tuned the city scenes.
Her version brought in more fairy-tale aspects.
Now that he had a script, Cooper needed a leading lady,
For that he turned to his friend Fay Wray.
He told her that if she took the film she would act opposite the tallest, darkest, leading man in Hollywood.
Fay thought he meant Clark Gable or Cary Grant.
She quickly found out it was going to be a giant ape.
Making the film was a massive undertaking to bring King Kong to life. It ushered in new techniques for rear protection, stop-motion photography, puppetry, and animation. Like Star Wars and Jurassic Park, the special effects pioneered in the film revolutionized filmmaking.
Cooper was also a producer on Fay’s latest film, The Most Dangerous Game, which would be filmed at the same time as King Kong.
During breaks, Fay and Cooper ran over back and forth to the King Kong set.
In The Most Dangerous Game, Fay had her natural dark hair colour, but in King Kong she wore a blonde wig, which meant she was in and out of wig many times during the day.
It was grueling work for Fay who ended up working 22 hours straight.
She also recorded all her character’s screams, and there are a lot of them, which meant screaming into a microphone for eight hours.
For weeks she could barely speak above a whisper.
Her voice wasn’t the only thing impacted.
Anytime she was in the hand of King Kong, the crew cinched it around her waist as she was lifted twelve metres in the air.
Below her was a cement floor and there was no safety harness.
If she fell out of the hand, she would be injured.
In each shot, as the wind machine blew in her hair, she had to struggle but not too much. quote
“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. Then I would holler and they would let me know.”
End quote.
King Kong opened in New York City on March 2, 1933, to an audience of 180,000 people on opening week.
It then premiered across the United States on April 7 and made $650,000.
Since its release, the film has become a cinematic classic.
In 1991, King Kong was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Seven years later, the American Film Institute named it the 43rd greatest film ever made.
It also went on to influence many films to come. Tomoyuki Tanaka, the creator of Godzilla said,
“I felt like doing something big. That was my motivation. I thought of different ideas. I like monster movies, and I was influenced by King Kong.”
It also inspired several remakes in 1976, 1986, 1998 and 2005.
King Kong continues to grace our screens in the MonsterVerse, where he has co-starred with the creature he influenced, Godzilla.
As for Fay Wray, King Kong was the pinnacle of career.
King Kong brought Fay Wray to a new level of fame, and with that came greater scrutiny A year after the film was released, her mother was threatened and she was blackmailed.
When police arrested the man, it was revealed he was from a prominent Salt Lake City family and was in love with Vaida, Fay’s older sister.
Due to the influence of the Salt Lake City mayor, the young man went back to his family and avoided jail.
Meanwhile, her husband continued to have affairs out in the open.
John kept a beach house where he worked in privacy but also entertained friends and women.
One night, Fay was on her way home and stopped by the beach house to get something.
As she walked up to the door, a chauffeur in a limousine in the driveway asked her not to go inside.
When she went in, she found John wearing a towel as a young woman ran down the stairs and out the door in her underwear.
As she dealt with John and tried to make the marriage work, Fay threw herself into her work.
Following the success of King Kong, she appeared in fourteen films in two years.
But none reached the level King Kong had,
Viva Villa! From 1934 was nominated for Best Picture and had respectable returns at the box office.
But the rest aren’t memorable at all.
In 1935, she travelled to England to make her first British film, Come Out of the Pantry, a musical comedy directed by Jack Raymond, starring Jack Buchanan
That led to three more films in England.
Meanwhile things at home weren’t great.
John was his usual distant self with her, and during the Christmas season he was more angry than happy with her.
Then on Jan. 1, 1936, while standing on a balcony in the morning to welcome in the new year, Fay suddenly became ill.
She soon realized she was pregnant.
When she called John, he asked her what the hell did it have to do with him.
She later wrote,
“I went out onto the balcony and looked down into the valley and asked whatever forces might be there or in the sky above to give me the power to hate him.”
Her doctor asked her why she would have a child with a man like John.
She responded she was having the child for herself.
Susan was born on Sept. 24, 1936, but Fay’s marriage to John was in serious trouble.
By now John was struggling with drug use both legal and otherwise.
That made him dangerous and unstable.
Sometimes he would be a loving husband and father, but other times could be terrifying in the home.
Today, it is believed he had bipolar disorder but in the 1930s, there was little understanding of the condition and even less treatment.
With no help for his condition, he continued to spiral.
In late-1937, while Fay was sleeping, he injected her with a narcotic in the hopes she would join him in his downward spiral.
This was the last straw.
Fay left immediately and asked for a divorce.
He told her he would think about it.
As she waited for a John’s response
Elvina was suffering from dementia.
Fay sat at her mother’s side for days on end.
Her mother, in her delirium, talked of her happier days as a student and the years before she married Joseph.
On April 28, 1938, Elvina died at the age of sixty-eight.
In her suffering she met someone new.
Howard Hughes.
He was an inventor, engineer, film producer, and investor, and also one of the richest men in the world.
He produced several big-budget films in the 20s and in 1932, he founded Hughes Aircraft Company.
He then spent the next 20 years breaking world air speed records and building revolutionary aircraft.
In mid-1938, Hughes was setting a record of flying around the world in four days and Fay was in New York acting in the play Angela is Twenty-Two.
One summer night, she was at a dinner party in the home of journalist Herbert Swope when Hughes walked in.
He immediately became infatuated with her.
He waited for her after each one of her performances and drove her back to her hotel. At one point, he sent her one hundred gardenias. While they never became romantically involved the press believed the two were dating.
I should note that during this time he was also having a passionate and tumultuous 18-month romance with Katharine Hepburn but while Fay was distracted by one of the richest men in the world, John sold their Hollywood home, along with everything inside, and emptied the bank accounts.
He then took their daughter and disappeared.
After two weeks of stress John turned up in New York and Fay was finally reunited with her daughter.
Only hours later, Fay received a phone call.
She was needed back in Hollywood.
Years later, she wondered if John had something to do with it so she would be out of the city.
She couldn’t say no. Her bank account was empty and needed the work.
Fay left Susan in the care of a nurse, with a promise from John that he would not leave New York City.
As soon as she left John took Susan and disappeared again.
For six weeks, Fay worked on the film while waiting to hear anything about them.
Police were on the case, and she begged them for updates.
When she heard John was in Virginia, she spent every dime she had to hire the best lawyer she could.
She hired William Donovan, an up-and-coming lawyer.
He would go on to establish the Office of Strategic Services, what we call the CIA.
But for now, he was working for Fay, and he traveled with her to Charlottesville, where they found John at the University of Virginia Hospital under psychiatric care.
Once again, she was reunited with Susan.
William Donovan smoothed things over with John and he put Fay and Susan on a train to California where the courts would be more favourable to her receiving full custody Fay and John were finally divorced in late-1939.
On March 1, 1940, John hung himself in a boarding house.
By the time John passed Fay had moved on.
On Dec. 24, 1940, she was at a Christmas party at the home of actor Richard Barthelmess and his wife Jessica.
At the party she caught a man staring at her.
His name was Robert Risken, whom she had met briefly years earlier at a tennis club.
He asked her out on a date to see The Grapes of Wrath, and over the next few weeks, they went to various dinners together.
She found Robert attractive and kind, but at the time she was dating playwright Clifford Odets.
While she waited for a proposal from Clifford, Robert Rickens watched Fay from afar hoping to one day win her heart.
Odet never proposed. Eventually, he told her he was not good enough for her and the two parted ways.
Soon after, she and Robert reconnected.
For Fay, Robert was unlike any man she had dated before, he was faithful and only had eyes for her.
On Aug. 23, 1942, the couple married in New York City.
After Fay and Robert married, she focused on her family.
Robert adopted Susan, and then the couple had two children together, Victoria and Robert.
These were happy years for Fay Robert’s work with the Office of War Information during the Second World War paid the bills, when the war ended, he went back to screenwriting.
Things were good and Fay was content that is until Dec. 26, 1950, when Robert came home from work with a terrible headache.
His left arm and hand also felt weak.
When he went to see a neurologist, the doctor recommended he get to the hospital.
The next day, Robert had a stroke. They believed he had a brain tumour, so he went in for emergency surgery.
Doctors discovered there was no tumour, but blood clots.
Robert slowly recovered but he could not write anymore.
Despite the surgery and the best care from doctors, he was never the same.
Fay returned to acting in 1953 and appeared in two films, along with a guest spot on television for the first time.
Whenever she had a spare moment, she spent it with Robert.
On Sept. 20, 1955, Robert passed away.
And Fay turned to work to make ends meet.
From 1955 to 1965, she acted in nine movies and numerous television shows including Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Playhouse 90.
During that period, she had the most success with the television show The Pride of the Family where she played Catherine Morrison, the wife of ad executive Albie and mother to their two children Junior and Ann, played by future movie star Natalie Wood.
The show aired for only one season and filmed thirty-nine episodes.
In 1971, she married for the third time to Sanford Rothenberg, who was Robert’s neurosurgeon. They remained together until Sanford died of colon cancer in 1991.
By then she had long retired.
She wrote her autobiography, On the Other Hand, and spent her time making public appearances at fan conventions celebrating movies like King Kong.
When Peter Jackson was making his own version in the early-2000s, he approached Fay about a cameo in the movie.
He hoped she would play a woman in the crowd who said the final line,
“It was beauty that killed the beast.”
While she met with Jackson and Naomi Watts, who would play Ann Darrow, in the end Fay decided not to take the role.
By then she had been awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award, and the Legend in Film Award.
Her legacy was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as well.
On Aug. 8, 2004, Fay Wray died in her sleep in New York City.
Two days later, the lights of the Empire State Building were lowered for 15 minutes in her honour.
After her death, a park in Cardston was named after her, and she was awarded a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame.
In 2006, she was one of the first four entertainers honoured by Canada Post with a stamp.
But did you know that Fay was also offered a role in the biggest film ever made?
In the mid-1990s, fellow Canadian James Cameron approached Fay Wray about a role in his new film about the most famous shipwreck in history, The Titanic.
He wanted her to play the elderly Rose Dawson Calvert, while Kate Winslet played the younger version.
While Fay was tempted, she decided in the end to pass on it.
That role went to Gloria Stuart, who earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance.
Camerons’ film went on to become the highest grossing movie in history and won 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
At the Oscar ceremony on March 23, 1998, Fay was a special guest and was introduced by Billy Crystal as the “Beauty who charmed the Beast”.
She was the only actress from the 1920s in attendance that night.
Fay could have certainly added to her legacy if she had taken the role in Titanic.
But she had already appeared in a landmark movie in her lifetime, opposite one of the most famous leads in film history.
King Kong.
*sources*
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0942039/
- Canadian Encyclopedia: https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/fay-wray
- Canada’s Walk of Fame: https://www.canadaswalkoffame.com/inductees/fay-wray/
- Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir by Victoria Riskin
