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I first saw "King Kong" on the big screen as a little girl, perhaps five or six years old. It was the first movie I recognized as 'art', though I would not have known it at the time. I felt such grief for the big ape because even at that young age I could understand his "love", and when the guy at the end said, it wasn't the planes that killed Kong, "it was Beauty killed the Beast", I knew it meant something profound. It's been a special film for me ever since, and I was pleased to read what Miss Wray says below. - Perdita
Fay Wray, Beauty to Kong's Beast, Dies at 96 - NYTimes, August 9, 2004
Fay Wray, an actress who appeared in about 100 movies but whose fame is inextricably linked with the hours she spent struggling helplessly and screaming in the eight-foot-hand of King Kong, died on Sunday night at her apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She was 96. Rick McKay, a friend, announced her death.
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."
"They shouldn't have tried," she added.
full obit.
Fay Wray, Beauty to Kong's Beast, Dies at 96 - NYTimes, August 9, 2004
Fay Wray, an actress who appeared in about 100 movies but whose fame is inextricably linked with the hours she spent struggling helplessly and screaming in the eight-foot-hand of King Kong, died on Sunday night at her apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She was 96. Rick McKay, a friend, announced her death.
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."
"They shouldn't have tried," she added.
full obit.
