She spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents' home and a boarding school, and was raised primarily by her grandfather, B. F. Brisac, a prominent San Francisco businessman who was a surrogate father and mentor until his death in 1940.

[1] Divorced from Mockbee, her mother married theatre director-manager John Griffith Wray in 1915 and moved with him to Los Angeles when he accepted a directing job at the Thomas Ince Studios.

After graduating from high school, she worked as a model for Hollywood fashion designer Howard Greer, briefly attended the University of California at Los Angeles, and lived for a while at The Rehearsal Club in New York, where she considered and ultimately rejected the idea of becoming an actress.

[f] In 1948, 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 Wray signed a contract in February 1948 to rewrite a script written by Michael Hogan titled A Mask for Lucrezia.

In September 1948, shortly before Dead Letter and A Mask for Lucrezia were set to go into production, 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.

In recounting the experience to her daughter many years later, Wray described the person she met with as nervous and "obviously embarrassed" by what they were doing, at one point offering whispered advice that "they've already been named, dear - you won't be hurting anyone.

"[1] Abstract philosophical ideas hotly debated over too many drinks at studio parties did not, to Wray's mind, constitute subversive activity; and to just wave her finger in the direction of a name she did not know—something her Paramount interrogator actually suggested—was unthinkable.

[n] Wray would go on to write two (credited) 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.

When her contract on Guns of Diablo ended, she returned to Warner Bros., which was closer to home and did not require driving at night, and she continued working as a story analyst there, and at The Walt Disney Studios until her failing vision forced her to stop.

To go through the then long and complicated cataract surgery and recovery process, she retired in 1972 and lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the next several years – an area she remembered fondly from her trip there in 1943 to find and photograph the places that would become the sets and backdrops in The Leopard Man.

But when I asked once what it was like working with Lewton, she smiled -- thought about it for a long moment -- and then told me about the night the group spent figuring out how to build to the first murder in The Leopard Man.

[p] The scene she had written was pure psychological terror, trading on very basic fears -- of the dark, of being punished unjustly, locked out of your own home, abandoned by people you trust -- and at the same time it sets up the mystery that is the premise of the entire film.

[q] The session went well into the small hours of the morning, was filled with laughter, and included a hilarious riff as one of them experimented with a set of castanets, which turned out to be the key to building the tension and suspense.

-- Stefani Warren, September 2016 With one exception, the credits listed are per Wray's Internet Movie Database Filmography;[38] where there is a discrepancy with other sources, clarifications can be found in individual footnotes.