AMERICA’S SWEETHEART DORIS DAY DEAD AT 97
LOSANGELES: Doris Day, the sunny blond actress and singer whose frothy roles in comedies and musicals made her one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1950s and ‘60s and a symbol of wholesome American womanhood, has died. She was 97.
In recent years, Day had been an animal rights advocate and her Doris Day Animal Foundation confirmed her death on Monday at her Carmel Valley, California, home. The foundation said she was surrounded by close friends. “Day had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia, resulting in her death,” the foundation said adding she requested “no funeral or memorial service and no grave marker.”
With her lilting contralto, wholesome blonde beauty and glowing smile, Day was a top box office draw and recording artist known for such films as Pillow Talk and That Touch of Mink and for such songs as Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera) from the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Over time, she became more than a name above the title: Right down to her cheerful, alliterative stage name, she stood for a time of innocence and G-rated love, a parallel world to her contemporary Marilyn Monroe. The running joke, attributed to both Groucho Marx and actorcomposer Oscar Levant, was that they had known Day “before she was a virgin.”
Day herself was no Doris Day, by choice and by hard luck. In her Oscar-nominated role in 1959’s Pillow Talk, the first of her three films with Rock Hudson, she proudly caught up with what she called “the contemporary in me.” Her 1976 tell-all book, Doris Day: Her Own Story, chronicled her money troubles and three failed marriages, contrasting with the happy publicity of her Hollywood career.
“I have the unfortunate reputation of being Miss Goody Two-Shoes, America’s Virgin, and all that, 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 wrote.
Day was given a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, as George W Bush declared it “a good day for America when Doris Marianne von Kappelhoff of Evanston, Ohio decided to become an entertainer.”
Although mostly retired from show business since the 1980s, she still had enough of a following that a 2011 collection of previously unreleased songs, My Heart, hit the top 10 in the UK.
The same year, she received a lifetime achievement honour from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Friends and supporters lobbied for years to get her an honorary Oscar.
Born to a music teacher and a housewife in Cincinnati, she had dreamed of a dance career, but at age 12 suffered a crippling accident: A car she was in was hit by a train and her leg was badly broken. Listening to the radio while recuperating, she began singing along with Ella Fitzgerald, “trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words.”
Day began singing in a Cincinnati radio station, then a local nightclub, then in New York. A bandleader changed her name to Day after the song Day after Day to fit it on a marquee.