Fall from a height of Empire State Building

Fay Wray, the actress who was held by King Kong from the top of the Empire State Building, had died aged 96. The star "drifted off quietly" in her Manhattan appartment, friends said.

Wray, known as the Queen of Scream, starred in 100 films in her career. But it was her role in King Kong, in which the giant gorilla grabbed her from a New York hotel room, that made her a movie icon. The scene from the 1933 movie was one of the most memorable pieces in cinematic history, informs Sky News.

The Hollywood Reporter reviews a point of Fay Wray death and mentions that the image of the diminutive, blonde-wigged Wray in the grasp of the giant, dark ape atop what was at the time the world's tallest building is one of cinema's most recognizable and powerful images.

"King Kong" was named one of the 100 greatest films of all time by the American Film Institute in 1998. "They told me I was going to have the tallest, darkest, leading man in Hollywood," Wray quipped in her 1989 autobiography, "On the Other Hand: A Life Story."

Vina Fay Wray, the fourth child in a family of six, was born at a ranch-house in Alberta, in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies on September 15 1907. Her mother, Vina Marguerite Jones, had married when very young a man who proved impotent, and fled north across the border with Joseph Herber Wray, an ingenious, feckless rolling stone who had been born in Hull. At the local junior high school, and afterwards at Hollywood High, she did well academically and performed in school productions at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1928 Fay Wray starred in what she always thought her best film, Erich von Stroheim's hugely expensive and uncompleted masterpiece, The Wedding March.

Very pretty and sweet-natured, she played opposite such major stars as Gary Cooper, Fredric March and William Powell, and was not only loved by Cary Grant and made love to by Howard Hughes, but won the hearts of the playwright Clifford Odets and the novelist Sinclair Lewis.

Fay Wray made more than 70 films throughout Hollywood's best period, but was irrevocably identified with her most famous role - the screaming girl in King Kong's enormous paw, informs Telegraph.