----- Original Message -----

From: John Weber

To: faywray@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 2:56 PM

Subject: [FayWray] Fay gets a STAR on Canada's "Walk Of Fame"

Fay has been inducted into the Walk of Fame in Toronto, Canada, along
with Keifer Sutherland and Alanis Morissette. Click on the following
link for a related article on Fay from JAM! SHOWBIZ:
http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/2005/06/03/1069768.html

(Just in case the above link doesn't work, the article's text follows
below.)

John
-------------------------

"Walk of Fame inductee: Fay Wray"

By JIM SLOTEK -- Toronto Sun  (June 3, 2005)

Don't you hate when you think you've got a date with Clark Gable, and
it turns out to be with a gorilla?

In 1932, Fay Wray had her chain yanked by a friend, producer Merian
C. Cooper, when he told her he had a movie in mind for her "starring
the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

"Well, naturally, I thought of Clark Gable," Wray told TV interviewer
Hugh Downs in a 1963 interview. "And when the script came I was
absolutely appalled! I thought it was a practical joke.

"I really didn't have much appetite for doing it, except that I did
admire these two people (Cooper and production partner Ernest B.
Schoedsack), and I realized that it did have at least some scope and
imagination. It had dimension above anything else that had been tried
in movies."

The Canadian-born ingenue -- who is being inducted posthumously
Sunday into Canada's Walk Of Fame -- took a chance on her blind date
and ended up being stuck to him for life. The actress, who died last
year at age 96, is forever associated with King Kong and remembered
for scene after scene of endless screaming as the "beauty that killed
the beast."

"I just imagined I was four miles from help," she said of her
predicament in Kong's mitt atop the Empire State Building. "And
well ... you'd scream too if you just imagined that situation with
that monster up there!"

As Ann Darrow, the "eye candy" in an expedition to trap a legendary
giant jungle ape, she set the template for distressed damsels to
come -- even as the movie broke new ground with its dark realism and
effects by legendary animator Willis O'Brien that brought the "Eighth
Wonder Of The World" to life.

But before Kong, Wray was already an old hand at tribulation and
distress. In the '90s she wrote a play called The Meadowlark about
her troubled family's move from Cardston, Alta., to Salt Lake City,
Utah.

"My parents were not getting along. My mother was quite intolerant.
She wanted us to feel we were above everyone in the town," she told
the online suspense magazine Scarlet Steet in 1998.

Eventually, the couple split and the mother moved to California with
their children (one of them a mentally ill son who ended up
committing suicide). There it fell to camera-friendly teenage
daughter Vina Fay to support the family.

She was obviously charismatic. While still a teenager, Wray was
chosen one of "13 Starlets To Watch" by an association of movie
advertisers, and auteur Erich von Stroheim cast her as the lead in
her breakthrough film The Wedding March after one audition (he is
said to have begun calling her by the character's name, "Mitzi,"
halfway through the audition).

Wray claimed in later interviews to have had an unreciprocated crush
on von Stroheim, but otherwise found herself attracted to writers --
not entirely happily.

Her first husband, John Monk Saunders, with whom she had a daughter,
was the writer of the silent classic Wings. He was a drug addict who
managed to burn through all their money (they made $1 million between
them in the first few years of their marriage).

Sinclair Lewis wrote her passionate love poems. And she dodged a
bullet by not marrying longtime boyfriend Clifford Odets (Hitchcock's
Notorious), judging by revelations of abuse of his wife Luise Rainer
and girlfriend Frances Farmer.

Her second husband, Robert Riskin (with whom she had two children),
was the author of It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes To Town.
That marriage saw her "retire" from acting -- her post-Kong
stereotyping having landed her in unfulfilling screamfests such as
The Vampire Bat, Dr. X and Mystery Of The Wax Museum. "It was horror
film after horror film, a series of about five, and I didn't care for
them," she said.

In the '50s, however, Riskin had a stroke and medical bills drained
their finances, forcing her to return to acting in movies such as
Tammy And The Bachelor and some TV (including an episode of Perry
Mason, where she was appalled to discover fellow Canadian Raymond
Burr read his lines on-camera).

Her last husband, Dr. Sandy Rothenberg, died in 1991. And Fay Wray
held true to her retirement this time around, notably turning down
the part of the aged Rose in Titanic, a role that would garner Gloria
Stuart an Oscar nomination.

Through her various challenges, she remained by accounts vivacious
and upbeat.

"I find it unacceptable when people blame Hollywood for the things
that happened to them," she once said. "Films are wonderful. I've had
a beautiful life because of films."

As for her hairy leading man, she came to love him too. "Every time
I'd pass the Empire State Building, I say a little prayer," she'd
say. "A good friend of mine died up there."





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