#WomanEmpowermentWednesday #HalloweenEdition Ardel Wray

Ardel Wray was born on October 28th, 1907 in Spokane, Washington to two stock theater actors who separated when she was young. She spent most of her childhood living with her maternal grandparents while mother, actress Virginia Brissac (best known playing James Dean's grandmother in "Rebel Without a Cause"), worked. Ardel came to live with Brissac and her new husband, director John Griffith Wray, once settling in Los Angeles in 1915. After a few odd jobs after high school, including being a model for costume designer Howard Greer and trying then dropping out of the University of California, Wray worked as a staff writer for Carl Laemmle Jr at Universal. From Universal, Wray moved to the story department at Warner Bros then Fox in 1936 then ended up settling at RKO in 1938. 

Wray would help with RKO's Young Writers' Project, which was designed to identify and cultivate talent at the studio. It's possible that producer Val Lewton found Wray through the project or through editor and eventual director Mark Robson. Her first assignment was to deliver a "workable script" about zombies. Wray was inspired by a story written by Ohio journalist Inez Wallace which would end up becoming "I Walked With a Zombie." It would be her most famous contribution. Outside of writing many of Lewton's films including "Bedlam" and "The Isle of the Dead," Wray also wrote the seventh installment of the Falcon detective series and an unfortunately shelved but original Blackbeard A-movie. 

When she signed a contract with Paramount in the beginnings of the McCarthy era, she was asked into an office and asked to point to names on a list of communist sympathizers, Wray declined and her credit on "Bride of Vengeance" (1949) was removed and she was released from her contract. According to her estate records and family history, she "described the person she met with as nervous and "obviously embarrassed" [...] at one point offering whispered advice that "They've already been named, dear - you won't be hurting anyone." She wouldn't be pointing a finger to a name she didn't know and her relationship with Dalton Trumbo was over a decade old and possibly generated by gossip. She was put on the "graylist," ruined her relationship with her mother, and lost her career in movies for 12 years until starting to write for television. To support her daughter, Wray fact-checked and novelized films for newspapers and was a reader in various studio story departments. Wray was forced to retire after her eyesight started to fail and after cataract surgery and recovery, she officially retired in 1972. She would pass away of breast cancer on October 14, 1983 and Wray's ashes were scattered at sea.