Actor Doris Day dies at 97
|
This article requires pre-publication review by an uninvolved reviewer (one not substantially involved in writing the article). Note, only qualified reviewers may do this and publish articles. This right requires experience with Wikinews policies and procedures. To request the right, apply here.Reviewers, please use Easy Peer Review per these instructions.
-Article last amended: May 14 at 22:42:31 UTC (history)Please check the talk page history before reviewing. |
| This article requires pre-publication review by an uninvolved reviewer (one not substantially involved in writing the article).
Note, only qualified reviewers may do this and publish articles. This right requires experience with Wikinews policies and procedures. To request the right, apply here.Reviewers, please use Easy Peer Review per these instructions.
-Article last amended: May 14 at 22:42:31 UTC (history)Please check the talk page history before reviewing. |
Monday, May 13, 2019
US-actor, singer and animal welfare advocate Doris Day died on Monday at her home in Carmel, California. Day made many studio albums, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and rescued animals from Hurricane Katrina.
Day’s foundation disclosed that she had been in otherwise excellent health for her age but had recently had pneumonia. Day, they said, desired no memorials or grave markers.
Fashion designer Mary Quant described Day in 2002: “Doris Day was America. Doris Day was everything that was wonderful about America. She was all woman, as well as being the girl next door. She had it all.”
Day was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio in the United States in 1924. The daughter of a music teacher, she had originally planned on a dancing career but broke her leg in a car-train collision at age 12. She began singing first on Cincinnati radio and then in clubs. She would shorten her name to “Doris Day,” after the song “Day after Day,” so that it would fit on a sign.
Over the course of her singing career, Day made 29 studio albums and performed live with big bands, such as Les Brown and His Band of Renown. In 1946, she was the highest-paid female singer in any country. In film, she specialized in musical romantic comedies.
Though she was nominated for the Oscar for the 1959 romantic comedy Pillow Talk, opposite Rock Hudson, Day personally considered her best film performance to be her portrayal of singer Ruth Etting in the James Cagney film Love Me or Leave Me. She also performed in two films by director Alfred Hitchcock, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Julie.
For much of her career, Day presented a very wholesome image. Although often called “sex comedies,” her movies contained no sex. “I have the unfortunate reputation of being Miss Goody Two-Shoes, America’s Virgin, and all that,” Day said in her 1976 autobiography, “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.”
Day’s popularity waned in the 1960. She made her last movie in 1968 and, for financial reasons concerning debts left behind after the death of her third husband, hosted The Doris Day Show on television until 1973, at which point she focused her career primarily on animal rights, founding the Doris Day Animal Foundation.
Day “founded one of the first national animal protection organizations dedicated to legislative remedies for the worst animal abuse,” said Sara Amundson, executive director of the Humane Society, which “led to dozens of bills, final rules and policies on the federal level.” Amundson cited improvements to the treatment of research chimpanzees and the ending of animal abuse videos.
In 1985, Day invited former co-star Hudson, then visibly deteriorating from AIDS, to appear on television together as part of Day’s talk show, Doris Day’s Best Friends. Although dogs were the purported subject of the episode, the LA Times would describe Day and the audience as “shocked by his gaunt appearance.” Footage of Hudson from the interview would replay on broadcasts as news spread that a star such as Rock Hudson had AIDS, which at the time was highly stigmatized.
At the time, a diagnosis of HIV was considered synonymous with being a homosexual, also highly stigmatized. When interviewed by the BBC, Day said of Hudson, “Nothing was ever talked about as far as his private life, I must tell you. Many people would ask me, ‘Is Rock Hudson really gay?’ and I said, ‘It’s something that I will not discuss. First of all, I know nothing about his private life, and if I did I wouldn’t discuss it, so I can’t tell you one thing about him except that he is a nice man.'” The LA Times would later say that Day and Hudson had introduced the public to AIDS in a compassionate way.
Day had one child, record producer Terry Melcher, with her first husband, musician Al Jorden. She was also married in turn to George Weidler, Marty Melcher, and Barry Comden, whom she divorced in 1981. She would later say that Jorden had been physically abusive to her.
“I’ve been through everything,” Day told The Bark in 2006. “I always said I was like those round-bottomed circus dolls—you know, those dolls you could push down and they’d come back up? I’ve always been like that. I’ve always said, ‘No matter what happens, if I get pushed down, I’m going to come right back up.'”
Day’s son, Terry Melcher, predeceased her in 2004.