Doris Day

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.