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| Fay Wray is renowned as the damsel in distress
in King Kong(AP) | Fay Wray, who played the
screaming girl kidnapped by the giant ape in the 1933 film King Kong, has
died aged 96.
A spokesman said the Canadian-born actress had died on
Sunday in New York.
Wray starred in about 100
films. She shot to fame in the 1928 silent classic, The Wedding March, and
often played damsels in distress.
She said she had not realised at the time "that King Kong and I were
going to be together for the rest of our lives, and longer".
She recalled how King Kong Director Merian C Cooper "called me into his
office and showed me sketches of jungle scenes, and told me 'You're going
to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood'."
"Naturally, I thought Clark Gable.
"But then he showed me this sketch of a giant ape up the side of the
Empire State Building, he said, 'There's your leading man'."
She admitted that at the premiere of the movie, said she had not been
"too impressed". Wray was born in 1907 on a farm in Alberta, Canada, but
emigrated to Los Angeles with her mother when her parents separated.
She hunted for work in Hollywood and from the age of 16 began picking
up parts as an extra in various films.
She made her name in horror movies like Doctor X (1932) and The Vampire
Bat (1933), and went on to appear with such stars as Ronald Colman, Gary
Cooper and Spencer Tracy.
But it was King Kong that secured her immortality on the silver screen.
In April this year film experts voted King Kong the most terrifying
movie monster of all time in UK film magazine Empire.
In 1991 Wray was the guest of honour at a ceremony marking the 60th
birthday of the Empire State Building.
She said that if she were the mayor of New York, "I would want to run
the city from this building... and get up every morning to see the sun
rise."
She just kind of drifted
off quietly as if she was going to sleep... She just kind
of gave out
Rick McKay, a friend, and the director of her last film, the
documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, said she had died at her apartment
in Manhattan.
He did not say what the official cause of death was.
Wray was married three times. She had a daughter, Susan, from her first
marriage, and a daughter and son, Victoria and Robert Jr, from the second.
(Agencies) | 
Updated: 2004-08-10 10:42