Actors - Doris Day

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Doris Day

	Actors - Doris Day

Doris Day (born April 3, 1924), is an American singer, actress, and animal welfare advocate. A vivacious blonde with a wholesome image, she was one of the most prolific actresses of the 1950s and 1960s. Able to sing, dance, and play comedy and dramatic roles, she was an all-rounded star whose personality permeated many popular and diverse movies.

Biography

Day was born Doris Mary Ann von Kappelhoff in Evanston, Ohio to German immigrants. The second of two children, she was named "Doris" after silent movie actress Doris Kenyon, whom her mother liked. Her family was Roman Catholic, despite her parents' divorce. She later embraced Christian Science.

Day started out as a dancer, winning a contract that enabled her, only twelve years old, to travel to Hollywood, California with her partner, Jerry Doherty, in 1936, but turned to singing when she injured her leg in an auto accident in 1937. She sang with the big bands of Barney Rapp, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown, before setting out on her own in the late 1940s. It was Barney Rapp who convinced her that "Kappelhoff" was too awkward a name and suggested "Day" after the song "Day after Day" that was part of her repertoire. She never really liked the name Doris Day, thinking it sounded too much like a stripper; this was ironic, since she eventually became associated with a nearly opposite image of wholesomeness and innocence.

With Brown, she charted twelve popular music hits, among them her first two # 1's: "Sentimental Journey" and "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time". "Sentimental Journey" earned her a flood of letters from World War II GIs. She admitted coming to hate singing "Journey", but never tired of reading the letters. On her own, she had more # 1's, including "Secret Love".

Day acted in many films, in most of which she sang. Day began her film career in musicals, starting in 1948 as a peppy, Betty Huttonesque persona. Her first film was Romance on the High Seas; in her audition she beat out over one hundred actresses, some of whom were established figures. Early publicity saddled her with such unflattering nicknames as "The Tomboy with a Voice" and "The Golden Tonsil". She continued to make saccharine and somewhat low-level musicals such as Starlift, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, and Tea for Two for Warner Brothers until the cycle exhausted itself. 1953 found Doris as pistol packin' Calamity Jane in what has become one of Hollywood's most enduring musicals, winning the Oscar for Best Song for "Secret Love". In 1955, she received some of the best notices of her career for her portrayal of singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me, co-starring James Cagney. She continued to be paired with some of Hollywood's biggest male stars, including James Stewart, Cary Grant, David Niven, and Clark Gable.

In Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, she sang "Whatever Will Be (Que Será, Será)", which won an Oscar. According to Jay Livingston (who wrote the song with Ray Evans) Day preferred another song used briefly in the film, "We'll Love Again", and skipped the recording for "Que Será, Será". When the studio pushed her, she relented, but after recording the number in one take she reportedly told a friend of Livingston's, "That's the last time you'll ever hear that song." "Que Será, Será" (Spanish for "what will be, will be") became her signature song, used in her later film Please Don't Eat the Daisies and as the theme song for her television show, and was covered by Sly & the Family Stone in 1973.

In 1959, Day entered her most successful phase as a film actress with the hugely popular Pillow Talk
co-starring Rock Hudson, who became a lifelong friend. The film received positive reviews and was a box office favourite. It also brought a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress for Day. She and Hudson made two more films together. Many of her 1960s films ignored her singing abilities and painted her as a good-hearted woman with a strong will, a hint of naïveté, and the purest virtue this side of a nun. Times as well as attitudes changed, but Day's films did not. Critics, comics and pundits attacked Day as "the world's oldest virgin" and audiences began to shy away from her repetitive, gimmicky roles. Day herself found many of her mid-late 1960s films to be of very poor quality (her least favorite was Caprice, co-starring Richard Harris) and did them only at the insistence of her third husband, Marty Melcher. One of the roles he turned down for her was Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate
(a role that went to Anne Bancroft). Later, in her published memoirs co-authored by A.E. Hotchener, Doris says that she herself rejected the part on moral grounds.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Doris Day ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Doris Day; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Doris Day

Biography

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay