That Touch of Mink

Delbert Martin Mann Jr. was born in Lawrence, Kansas, on 30 January 1920, and grew up largely in Nashville, Tennessee. After service as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, he studied at Vanderbilt University and the Yale School of Drama before joining the ranks of directors working in live television drama during its 1950s golden age, directing extensively for NBC's Philco Television Playhouse and Goodyear Television Playhouse. His defining early work was directing the 1953 television broadcast of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, a spare, unglamorous story of a lonely Bronx butcher, for the Philco Playhouse. He then directed the 1955 feature film adaptation with Ernest Borgnine in the lead role, and it became an unexpected sensation, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and earning Mann the Academy Award for Best Director — a rare instance of a filmmaker winning the top directing honor for what was essentially an intimate character study rather than a spectacle. Mann carried the same low-key sensibility into subsequent features, including Separate Tables (1958), the film version of Terence Rattigan's play, and moved fluidly between drama and romantic comedy, directing Lover Come Back (1961) with Doris Day and Rock Hudson before pairing Day with Cary Grant in That Touch of Mink (1962). He continued directing films and extensively for television into the 1980s and served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 1967 to 1971. He died in Los Angeles on 11 November 2007, at eighty-seven.

Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 3 April 1922. An injury from a car accident at age fifteen ended her early ambitions as a dancer, and she turned to singing, adopting the stage surname Day and rising to prominence as a vocalist with bandleader Les Brown's orchestra in the early 1940s, scoring a major hit with "Sentimental Journey" in 1945. She moved into film in 1948 with Romance on the High Seas and quickly became a major star of Warner Bros. musicals through the early 1950s, including Calamity Jane (1953), which produced her signature song "Secret Love." Her range expanded into dramatic and suspense roles, notably as the mother of a kidnapped child in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), for which she also sang "Que Sera, Sera," later her best-known recording. Her career reached its commercial peak in a run of glossy romantic comedies beginning with Pillow Talk (1959) opposite Rock Hudson, which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and continuing through Lover Come Back (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962) with Cary Grant. Through the first half of the 1960s she was consistently ranked among the top box-office draws in the country, male or female. She largely withdrew from films after The Ballad of Josie (1968) and moved into television with The Doris Day Show, retiring from acting altogether in the 1970s. She devoted the remainder of her life to animal welfare, founding the Doris Day Animal Foundation and the Doris Day Animal League, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. She died in Carmel Valley, California, on 13 May 2019, at ninety-seven.