Doris Day


Doris Day was an American actress and singer. With an entertainment career that spanned nearly 50 years, Day was one of the most popular and acclaimed female singers of the 1940s and 1950s, with a parallel career as a leading actress in Hollywood films, where she became one of the biggest box-office stars of the 1960s. She was known for her on-screen girl next door image and her distinctive singing voice.
Day began her career as a big band singer in 1937, achieving commercial success in 1945 with two No. 1 recordings, "Sentimental Journey" and "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" with Les Brown and His Band of Renown. She left Brown to embark on a solo career and recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967. Her recording of "Que Sera, Sera " became known as her signature song and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011.
Day made her film debut with the musical Romance on the High Seas. She played the title role in the musical Calamity Jane and starred in the thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. She co-starred with Rock Hudson in three successful comedies: Pillow Talk, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers. Day also worked with actor James Garner on both Move Over, Darling and The Thrill of It All. After ending her film career in 1968, she starred in her own television sitcom The Doris Day Show.
In 1989, Day was awarded the Golden Globe and the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement in Motion Pictures. In 2004, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2008, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award as well as a Legend Award from the Society of Singers. In 2011, she was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's Career Achievement Award., Day was one of eight recording artists to have been the top box-office earner in the United States four times. Day was a prominent advocate for animal welfare and founded the advocacy group Doris Day Animal League and the non-profit organization Doris Day Pet Foundation, now the Doris Day Animal Foundation.

Early life

Day was born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff on April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of German-American parents Alma Sophia and William Joseph Kappelhoff. She was named after actress Doris Kenyon. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was a music teacher and choirmaster. Her paternal grandfather Franz Joseph Wilhelm Kappelhoff immigrated to the United States in 1875 and settled within the large German community in Cincinnati. For most of her life, Day stated that she was born in 1924, but on the occasion of her 95th birthday, the Associated Press found her birth certificate that showed a 1922 year of birth.
Day had two older brothers: Richard, who died before her birth, and Paul. Her father's infidelity caused her parents to separate in 1932 when she was 10. She developed an early interest in dance, and in the mid-1930s formed a dance duo with Jerry Doherty that performed in nationwide competitions. She had signed a contract with a casting company to be a dancer and she was preparing to move to Los Angeles to pursue this opportunity. Family friends that lived just north of Cincinnati, in Hamilton, Ohio, planned a going-away party for her, but tragedy struck on her way to the party. On October 13, 1937, while Day was riding with friends, their car collided with a freight train, and she broke her right leg, curtailing her prospects as a professional dancer.

Career

Early career (1938–1947)

While recovering from her car accident, Day sang along with the radio and discovered her singing talent. She later said: "During this long, boring period, I used to while away a lot of time listening to the radio, sometimes singing along with the likes of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. But the one radio voice I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I'd sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words."
Day's mother Alma arranged for Doris to receive singing lessons from Grace Raine. After three lessons, Raine told Alma that Day had "tremendous potential" and gave her three lessons per week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had a greater effect on her singing style and career than had anyone else.
During the eight months when she was receiving singing lessons, Day secured her first professional jobs as a vocalist on the WLW radio program Carlin's Carnival and in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn. During her radio performances, she first caught the attention of Barney Rapp, who was seeking a female vocalist and asked her to audition for the job. According to Rapp, he had auditioned about 200 other singers.
In 1939, Rapp suggested the stage name Doris Day because the Kappelhoff surname was too long for marquees and he admired her rendition of the song "Day After Day". While working with Rapp, she sang for his band, the New Englanders, and was paid $50 per day; her manager stole half.
After working with Rapp, Day worked with bandleaders Jimmy James, Bob Crosby and Les Brown. In 1941, Day appeared as a singer in three Soundies with the Les Brown band.
While working with Brown, Day recorded her first hit recording, "Sentimental Journey", released in early 1945 and which went to #1 on the Billboard. It soon became an anthem for World War II servicemen. The song continues to be associated with Day, and she rerecorded it on several occasions, including a version for her 1971 television special. During 1945–46, Day had six other top ten hits on the Billboard chart: "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time", Tain't Me", "Till the End of Time", "You Won't Be Satisfied ", "The Whole World Is Singing My Song" and "I Got the Sun in the Mornin. Les Brown said, "As a singer Doris belongs in the company of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra."

Early film career (1948–1954)

While singing with the Les Brown band and for nearly two years on Bob Hope's weekly radio program, Day toured extensively across the United States as the era of big bands had given way to solo pop singers.
Her performance of the song "Embraceable You" impressed songwriter Jule Styne and his partner Sammy Cahn, and they recommended her for a role in Romance on the High Seas. Day was cast for the role after auditioning for director Michael Curtiz. She was shocked to receive the offer and admitted to Curtiz that she was a singer without acting experience but he appreciated her honesty and felt that "her freckles made her look like the All-American Girl."
The film provided her with a No. 2 hit recording as a soloist, "It's Magic", which occurred two months after her hit "Love Somebody", a duet with Buddy Clark and they would have another hit shortly after that with a cover of Patti Page's "Confess." Her first solo hit was "Sentimental Journey" in 1945. Day recorded "Someone Like You" before the film My Dream Is Yours, which featured the song. In 1950, she collaborated as a singer with the polka musician Frankie Yankovic, and the U.S. servicemen in Korea voted her their favorite star.
Her heyday as a hitmaker was from 1948 to 1951 when she placed 15 songs on the Billboard Hot 30 list and was one of the top female pop vocalists, competing with rivals such as Dinah Shore, Jo Stafford, and Patti Page.
Day continued to appear in light musicals such as On Moonlight Bay, By the Light of the Silvery Moon and Tea For Two for Warner Bros.
File:Calamity Jane trailer.jpg|thumb|left|220px|Day with Howard Keel in Calamity Jane
Her most commercially successful film for Warner Bros. was I'll See You in My Dreams, a musical biography of lyricist Gus Kahn that broke box-office records of 20 years. It was Day's fourth film directed by Curtiz. She appeared as the title character in the comedic western-themed musical Calamity Jane. A song from the film, "Secret Love", won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became Day's fourth No. 1 hit single in the United States.
Between 1950 and 1953, the albums from six of her film musicals charted in the Top 10, including three that reached No. 1. After filming Lucky Me with Bob Cummings and Young at Heart with Frank Sinatra, Day elected to not renew her contract with Warner Brothers.
During this period, Day also had her own radio program, The Doris Day Show. It was broadcast on CBS in 1952–1953.

Breakthrough (1955–1958)

Primarily recognized as a musical-comedy actress, Day began to accept more dramatic roles in order to broaden her range. Her dramatic star turn as singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me, with top billing above James Cagney, received critical and commercial success, becoming Day's greatest film success to that point. Cagney said that she had "the ability to project the simple, direct statement of a simple, direct idea without cluttering it," comparing her performance to that of Laurette Taylor in the Broadway production The Glass Menagerie. Day felt that it was her best film performance. The film's producer Joe Pasternak said, "I was stunned that Doris did not get an Oscar nomination." The film's soundtrack album became a No. 1 hit.
Day starred in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense film The Man Who Knew Too Much opposite James Stewart. She sang two songs in the film, "Que Sera, Sera ", which won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, and "We'll Love Again". The film was Day's 10th to reach the top 10 at the box office. She played the title role in the film noir thriller Julie with Louis Jourdan.
After three successive dramatic films, Day returned to her musical/comedic roots in The Pajama Game with John Raitt, based on the Broadway play of the same name. She appeared in the Paramount comedy Teacher's Pet alongside Clark Gable and Gig Young. She costarred with Richard Widmark and Gig Young in the romantic comedy film The Tunnel of Love and with Jack Lemmon in It Happened to Jane.
Billboard annual nationwide poll of disc jockeys had ranked Day as the No. 1 female vocalist nine times in ten years, but her success and popularity as a singer was now being overshadowed by her box-office appeal. However, Day still had several more major hits over the '50s, including "Secret Love", "I'll Never Stop Loving You", and "Que Sera Sera " despite rock-and-roll reducing interest in older singers. The last charting single she had was "Lover Come Back" in 1962.