Although she made more than 100 films and worked with most of the leading directors and actors of the day, she is almost solely remembered for her performance as Ann Darrow, an unemployed actor invited by a film producer to the remote Skull Island to act as bait for the giant gorilla, which is captured and taken to New York. The city, where Kong held Wray at the pinnacle of the Empire State Building, was the other star of the film.

Wray was lured into the film by the co-director Merian Cooper's promise that she would star opposite "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood". Her performance became the stuff of movie legend and set the template for the blond, virginal beauty pursued by the hirsute beast.

Most of the screams she emits in the picture were recorded in a single 22-hour session and subsequently dubbed, and her close-ups were shot in a two-metre (6ft) mechanical device which doubled as Kong's arm and hand.

But Wray was a star before King Kong was made in 1933: one of her 11 films that year. In 1928 she had starred opposite Erich von Stroheim in his film The Wedding March.

"As soon as I had seen Fay Wray and spoken with her for a few minutes, I knew I had found the right girl," he said. "I didn't even take a test of her. Fay has spirituality - but she also has that very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men."

Wray was born in 1907 in Alberta, Canada. Her family moved to Los Angeles, where she attended Hollywood high school and landed small parts in the movies. After filming The Wedding March, but before its release, she appeared in The Legion of the Condemned with Gary Cooper.

Soon afterwards she married the film's screenwriter, John Monk Saunders, a womaniser who "had this theme in his life of living dangerously and dying young". They were divorced 11 years later and she had two further marriages.

Despite her work with directors such as Josef von Sternberg and Frank Capra and her semi-successful career as a playwright she was resigned to being remembered as the gorilla's co-star.

"Being in the most famous movie of all time is my greeting card," she told the Toronto Star in 1990.

"I finally got to lunch with Larry Olivier a few years back. Wouldn't talk a bit about Shakespeare to me. Only wanted to know how we'd made Kong climb the Empire State Building."