Fay Wray — Watch This Girl (1925) 🇺🇸

There is a youngster at the Hal Roach studios who some day is going to walk rings around the whole pack of flappers and dumbdora ingénues, or a lot of Hollywood people will be more than mildly surprised.

That girl, Fay Wray, has that something, difficult of description, which so many haven’t.

She is a youngster of seventeen whom F. Richard Jones, director general of the Roach studios, selects as having the best potentialities among the younger girls. And Jones for years picked types for Mack Sennett. Fay was born in Wrayland, Alberta, Canada, a small town founded by her father, in the mining and ranching business. The family lived for a time in Salt Lake City, where her father was attached to a mining company. They moved to Hollywood four years ago. Her brother, Vivien, is a poet.

Fay spent the summers doing occasional unimportant bits of movie acting, her timidity keeping her from forcing the casting directors to recognize her ability. Finally Jones, then with Mack Sennett, chanced to see her, and suggested that she come to him in a year or so when she would have grown up a bit more. She did so a year later, and he started her in two-reelers with Glenn Tryon and Frank Butler. Both Roach and Jones believe that she has exceptional talent. She is still attending high school each morning, reporting at the studio for work in the afternoon. There is no reasonable explanation for the emotional, tragic note that one fancies in her, for her life is quite ordinary; it impresses one, however, with the same undercurrent of impulsive feeling which underlies the placidity and childlike appeal of Mary Philbin.

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Photo by: Lee Graves

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1925