Fay Wray ≠ Clara Bow

I saw this image pass across my screen yesterday and said to myself “Fay Wray”, and thought no more about it.

Later that same day, while doing something else entirely I suddenly thought “Wooah, wait a minute. That was no Fay Wray: that was Clara Bow”.

I went and found the image and I proved right on my second guess. Except I didn’t think I guessed either time. Both times I felt convinced by my immediate response.

For those who don’t know, and Wikipedia does, Fay Wray “was a Canadian-American actress best known for starring as Ann Darrow in the 1933 film King Kong. Through an acting career that spanned nearly six decades, Wray attained international recognition as an actress in horror films. She has been dubbed one of the early ‘scream queens’.”

As evidence that her career didn’t fizzle out, James Cameron wanted her to appear in Titanic but she turned him down.

Clara Bow, on the other hand, “rose to stardom during the silent film era of the 1920s and successfully made the transition to “talkies” in 1929. Her appearance as a plucky shopgirl in the film It brought her global fame and the nickname “The It Girl”. Bow came to personify the Roaring Twenties and is described as its leading sex symbol”. So says Wikipedia, the world’s only source of information.

Her image formed the basis of masthead for the sixties alternative paper IT. She retired from movies, suffered from severe depression, and died of a heart attack in 1965 at the age of sixty.