22 Facts About Ardel Wray

Ardel Wray was an American screenwriter and story editor, best known for her work on Val Lewton's classic horror films in the 1940s.

Ardel Wray came to live with them in 1922, later taking her stepfather's last name.

Ardel Wray had two short-lived marriages in the decade following high school, both to California artists, Henry D Maxwell and Don Mansfield Caldwell.

An early draft of Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun with a handful of Ardel Wray's margin notes was found among her papers after she died, and anecdotes in Ardel Wray's family history suggest that she and Trumbo became "an item" for a while, but if there was a relationship beyond their shared interest in writing it did not last.

Ardel Wray moved to the story department at Fox Studios in 1936, then to RKO in 1938.

Sometime after starting work at RKO, Ardel Wray became involved in the Young Writers' Project, a program designed to identify and cultivate writing talent at the studio.

Ardel Wray's opportunity was, in effect, a writing audition under pressure: Lewton was behind on an ambitious schedule and Ardel Wray became the second writer to try to deliver a workable script from a short story about zombies that Lewton liked.

Ardel Wray delivered the script for I Walked with a Zombie and went on to become a regular in the Lewton group.

In 1948, Ardel Wray was again approached by Lewton, then at Paramount Pictures, who was trying to rescue a project he was working on about the life of Lucrezia Borgia, with Paulette Goddard set to play the title role.

Paramount Pictures production records show that Ardel Wray signed a contract in February 1948 to rewrite a script written by Michael Hogan titled A Mask for Lucrezia.

Three months before Ardel Wray signed the contract at Paramount, industry producers had issued the Waldorf Statement and, by mid-1948, what came to be known as the witch-hunt of the McCarthy era was well under way in all studios.

In September 1948, shortly before Dead Letter and A Mask for Lucrezia were set to go into production, Ardel Wray was summoned to the business office at Paramount where, with little explanation, she was handed a list and asked to point to the names of people who were communist sympathizers; she declined.

Ardel Wray's mother was frightened by the incident.

Ardel Wray's husband had just returned from serving in the Philippines in WWII and was unemployed; the situation put a strain on their marriage, which ended in divorce a few years later.

Ardel Wray never remarried and, although she continued to look after her mother, their relationship never fully recovered from this period.

Ardel Wray had been working as a story analyst at Warner Bros.

Ardel Wray would go on to write two episodes of The Roaring 20s, and she continued to work with Ingster for the next six years as a writer and story editor on 77 Sunset Strip, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, and as assistant to the producer on the movie Guns of Diablo at MGM.

Ardel Wray returned to Los Angeles in 1980, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1983 and died on October 14,1983, aged 75.

Ardel Wray's mother had died only four years earlier at age 96.

Ardel Wray wrote three of the collection films celebrated in Martin Scorsese's 2007 documentary film Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, two of them groundbreaking screenplays that helped define the genre of the psychological thriller and establish Lewton's reputation as the master of horror.

Ardel Wray spoke about working with the group in a conversation with her daughter many years later, a recollection that shines a clear light on the group's chemistry and skill, and the special place it held in Wray's heart:.

Ardel Wray rarely spoke about her early career or the McCarthy era.