Doris Day, Hollywood actress and singer, dies aged 97 (bbc.co.uk).
Her films, which included Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and That Touch of Mink, made her known around the world.
But she never won an Oscar and was nominated only once, in 1960, for Pillow Talk, the first of her three romantic comedies with [Rock] Hudson.
A screen partnership from an icon who’s career spanned 80 years that was “one of the best-known in the history of romantic movies” but Day maintaining a mythical wholesome, girl-next-door image which at times invited ridicule:
Day herself said her “Miss Chastity Belt” image was “more make-believe than any film part [she] ever played.”
In reality having had married four times, divorcing three and windowed by the third, film producer Martin Melcher, with whom she shared a belief in Christian Science having been introduced to its belief that sickness is an illusion that can be corrected by prayer alone (Wikipedia) by her trombonist first husband Al Jorden during a brief reconciliation, and also having a mental breakdown and severe financial troubles after Melcher had squandered her money (heavy.com).
In the 1970s, she turned away from performing to focus her energies on her animal foundation.
Her last husband Barry Comden, maître d'hôtel at one of her favorite restaurants, having said as their marriage unraveled that she “cared more for her ‘animal friends’ than she did for him“.
#RIPDorisDay (Instagram).
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