SWEET SORROW
HOLLYWOOD LEGEND DORIS DAY DIES AT 97
Film star Doris Day, the sunny girl next door who held up her wholesome end beside box-office big shots like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, died Monday. She was 97.
Day, who later became an animal rights advocate, died surrounded by close friends at her home near Carmel Valley, Calif., according to the Doris Day Animal Foundation.
She “had been in excellent physical health for her age until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia,” the foundation said in a statement.
Day, who was also a successful recording artist best known for her dreamy ditty “Que Sera, Sera,” had refreshing roles in “Pillow Talk” — which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination — and “That Touch of Mink.” She was innocence personified on the big screen, the face behind family-friendly movies of the 1950s and ’60s that appealed to parents and their kids.
The running joke, attributed to both Groucho Marx and actor-composer Oscar Levant, was that they had known Day “before she was a virgin.”
But if directors wanted someone to play Doris Day in a movie, they might have wanted to stay away from Doris Day.
The real-life star was beset by money woes and saddled with three bad marriages. She told all about her tumult in her 1976 tell-all book, “Doris Day: Her Own Story.”
“I have the unfortunate reputation of being Miss Goody Two-Shoes, America’s Virgin, and all that,” she wrote. “So I’m afraid it’s going to shock some people for me to say this, but I staunchly believe no two people should get married until they have lived together.”
She would marry one more time.
The list of people paying tribute Monday read like the end credits of an all-star Hollywood movie.
“The great Doris Day left us and took a piece of the sun with her,” Goldie Hawn wrote on Twitter. “She brightened our lives and lived out her life with dignity. May she rest peacefully.”
Doris Mary Ann von Kappelhoff was born April, 3, 1922, in Cincinnati to a music teacher and a housewife. The girl named after silent movie actress Doris Kenyon dreamed of a dance career, but at age 12 her leg was badly broken when a car she was traveling in was hit by a train. She listened to the radio while she recuperated, singing along with Ella Fitzgerald. Soon, she began singing at a Cincinnati radio station, then a nightclub, then in New York. A bandleader changed her name to Day after the song “Day After Day” to fit it on a marquee. Her film career included movies in just about every genre, including the Western musical “Calamity Jane” in 1953, the biopic “Love Me or Leave Me” in 1955, the political thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956, and romantic comedies “Pillow Talk” in 1959, “Lover Come Back” in 1960 and “Move Over, Darling” in 1963. Day had one son, Terry Melcher, who died in 2004.