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Doris Day's Death
- Doris Day
- Actress, Singer, Activist
- April 3, 1922
- May 13, 2019
- Pneumonia complications
The life and death of Doris Day:
She was the wholesome one. Of the famous Hollywood blondes of the 1950’s, Marilyn Monroe was the sex siren, Grace Kelly was the cool, collected, soon-to-be real-life Princess but Doris Day had a completely different image – the girl next door. And she could sing too - parlaying her earliest success as a band singer into a movie career in which she sang an Academy Award Winning Song and was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in her long and storied career.
She was born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, of German ancestry. Her housewife mother was the former Alma Sophia Welz and her father was William Joseph Kappelhoff, a choir master and music teacher.
She had two older brothers, Richard and Paul. Richard died before Doris was born and Paul was a few years older than her.
As a young girl, Doris dreamed of becoming a dancer but when her right leg was injured in a 1937 car accident, she gave up hope of dancing professionally.
However, while she was recuperating, she started to sing along with the radio – she was a big Ella Fitzgerald fan – and Doris discovered that she too had a good voice. So, her Mom hired a teacher to give Doris singing lessons and within less than a year was a vocalist on a major Cincinnati radio station, WLW.
That led to some band gigs, including appearances with Les Brown and His Band of Renown…
…and her first big hit, “Sentimental Journey” was released in 1945.
When the song writing team of Jule Styne and Sammy Kahn heard Doris sing their hit “Embraceable You”, they recommended her for a role in the 1948 film “Romance on the High Seas”.
Doris auditioned and was shocked when she got the part, telling the director she was a singer with no acting experience. But he said he wanted someone who looked like the All-American Girl and her movie career was launched.
She had several major roles by the mid 1950’s – including a dramatic part in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” ...
…where her singing talent was on display with that year’s Academy Award winning song “Que Sera, Sera”.
Her biggest box office hits were a series of romantic comedies with Rock Hudson. It started with 1959’s Pillow Talk…
…for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. In fact, she never did win an Oscar for her acting.
And by the 1960’s, as the sexual revolution bloomed, Doris was tagged as “The World’s Oldest Virgin”, for her on screen persona.
She was hardly that and was in fact married four times. Her first husband, musician Al Jorden was the father of her only son Terry. Doris’ second marriage to George Wiedler lasted three years and her son Terry later assumed the last name of husband number three – Martin Melcher.
Terry, by the way, went onto a career as a big-time record producer. (In fact, it was Terry Melcher’s home that the Charles Manson family attacked in the summer of 1969 in the massacre that killed actress Sharon Tate and several others.)
Terry Melcher died of melanoma in 2004.
Doris’s marriage to Martin Melcher lasted from 1951 until he died in 1969. (Her fourth husband Barry Comden died in 2009.)
Martin badly mishandled her finances, leaving Doris deeply in debt and needing to go into TV, which she didn’t really want to do.
But the Doris Day Show had a five-year run on CBS-TV.
And she had several songs and record albums to her credit.
Doris was also an animal rights activist and strongly denounced the wearing of fur. A vegetarian, among her other accomplishment as an activist, Doris was instrumental in allowing people ‘s pets to stay in hotel rooms.
Doris Day died the day after Mother’s Day 2019 at the age of 97after complications from a severe case of pneumonia.