Farewell To Doris Day
I was sad to hear of Doris Day's passing on Monday the 13th, which also happened to be my birthday. She had been such a huge part of my youth, being my mum's favourite singer. I grew up with her music and particularly with the album Doris Day's Greatest Hits (the album cover — see below — is etched in my memory). I knew her as a singer long before I knew her as an actress but I also came to know her films when I was still young. The ones I remember from my childhood are all films with Rock Hudson (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers), Calamity Jane, Young at Heart and The Thrill of It All. I have loved those films ever since, especially the ones with Rock Hudson and Calamity Jane.
I want to write a little bit about Doris here and pay tribute to the wonderful performer that she was. She brought so much joy to millions of people till this very day, and she will go on to make people happy with her songs and films for many many years to come. (In this post I will focus on her singing and acting career and not on her personal life or work as an animal welfare activist.)
Doris Day (3 April 1922 – 13 May 2019) *) was born Doris Mary Kappelhoff and was initially interested in dance. But her dream of becoming a dancer was shattered when a car accident at the age of 15 injured her legs. While recovering, she started listening to the radio. She told A. E. Hotchner, one of her biographers, "During this long, boring period, I used to while away a lot of time listening to the radio, sometimes singing along with the likes of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. But the one radio voice I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I'd sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words." Her mother convinced her to take vocal lessons, and in 1939, at age 17, she began her career as a big band singer, first working for bandleader Barney Rapp. At his suggestion she changed her surname to Day (he admired her rendition of the song Day After Day). After working with Rapp, Doris continued singing for band leaders, first Jimmy James and Bob Crosby and then Les Brown. It was with Brown that Doris had her first hit song, Sentimental Journey, released in 1945.
*) Doris reportedly believed she was born in 1924, so for most of her life she had been thinking she was two years younger than her actual age. The Associated Press found her birth certificate, showing a date of birth of 1922, but she didn't learn of this fact until her 95th birthday (see here). I also read on her Wikipedia page that her paternal grandfather and grandmother were Dutch and German, respectively, which is a nice fact since I'm Dutch myself.
I want to write a little bit about Doris here and pay tribute to the wonderful performer that she was. She brought so much joy to millions of people till this very day, and she will go on to make people happy with her songs and films for many many years to come. (In this post I will focus on her singing and acting career and not on her personal life or work as an animal welfare activist.)
Doris Day (3 April 1922 – 13 May 2019) *) was born Doris Mary Kappelhoff and was initially interested in dance. But her dream of becoming a dancer was shattered when a car accident at the age of 15 injured her legs. While recovering, she started listening to the radio. She told A. E. Hotchner, one of her biographers, "During this long, boring period, I used to while away a lot of time listening to the radio, sometimes singing along with the likes of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. But the one radio voice I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that fascinated me, and I'd sing along with her, trying to catch the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she sang the words." Her mother convinced her to take vocal lessons, and in 1939, at age 17, she began her career as a big band singer, first working for bandleader Barney Rapp. At his suggestion she changed her surname to Day (he admired her rendition of the song Day After Day). After working with Rapp, Doris continued singing for band leaders, first Jimmy James and Bob Crosby and then Les Brown. It was with Brown that Doris had her first hit song, Sentimental Journey, released in 1945.
*) Doris reportedly believed she was born in 1924, so for most of her life she had been thinking she was two years younger than her actual age. The Associated Press found her birth certificate, showing a date of birth of 1922, but she didn't learn of this fact until her 95th birthday (see here). I also read on her Wikipedia page that her paternal grandfather and grandmother were Dutch and German, respectively, which is a nice fact since I'm Dutch myself.
%20(1).jpg)
“When I recorded for Columbia, I could usually do anything in one take ... I would invariably want to use the first take because that would be the one that was spontaneous and fresh.”
Doris would continue to have a very successful singing career, with over 650 song recordings released on the Columbia Records label from 1947 to 1967. Like I said, I grew up with her music and I absolutely love her voice. It's so sweet, smooth and velvety, and her diction is flawless. She has excellent command of the different tone colours in her voice and can alternate between singing very light (making her voice thin) and singing strong. Because she's got great technical skills and perfect breath control, she makes singing seem effortless.
I love both her ballads and upbeat numbers. One of my all-time fave Day songs is It's Magic (I recently saw the very enjoyable Romance on the High Seas where she sings this). I also loooove the title songs from the three Rock Hudson films (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers). These songs really make me happy when I hear them. Of course there are many songs that I love (I remember liking Cuttin' Capers a lot when I was young) and with such an extensive discography there are still many songs for me to discover that I've never heard Doris Day sing before. She liked to record songs in one take. For the recording of Secret Love she reportedly rode her bike to the studio, did only one take (in less than 15 minutes), with a full live orchestra present, and apparently the musical director was grinning from ear to ear.
Day's successful film career began in 1948 with Romance on the High Seas and would span two decades. Her filmography consists of 39 feature films released between 1948 and 1968. Though the start of her career shows many light musicals, she ventured into other genres as well, like comedies and dramas. Her most successful musical was Calamity Jane, with Doris singing the beautiful ballad Secret Love which won the Academy Award for Best Song, and she also starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much with James Stewart.
Her best-known films — and they are also my personal favourites — are the ones in which she teams up with Rock Hudson (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers). She had many other great leading men as her co-star, like Clark Gable (Teacher's Pet), Cary Grant (That Touch of Mink), Jack Lemmon (It Happened to Jane), David Niven (Please Don't Eat The Daisies), Rod Taylor (Do Not Disturb and The Glass Bottom Boat), and Richard Widmark (The Tunnel of Love). Apart from her pairing with Rock Hudson and their great on-screen chemistry, I think James Garner as leading man (with whom Day starred in The Thrill of It All and Move Over, Darling) comes second best. (In my opinion Jack Lemmon comes third, I love them together in It Happened to Jane. I still need to see Doris with Rod Taylor, and I wonder if they have good chemistry too, considering the fact they made two films together.) Day's film career ended in 1968 with With Six You Get Eggroll with Brian Keith. After that she starred in her own show The Doris Day Show (1968 - 1973).
“David Miller was a good director and really understood actresses. I thought his work with Doris Day on 'Midnight Lace' should have brought her an Academy Award. She really got inside that character and made you forget you'd ever seen Doris Day before.” “She had really grown as an actress in the 50's, from a June Allyson type to a real actress.” — Joan Crawford on Doris Day, interviewed by Paul Brogan in 1976
Like her singing, Doris' acting seemed effortless too. Jack Lemmon calls her "a method actress even though she never went to the Actors Studio or studied Stanislavsky" and Rock Hudson says the same about Doris, "an Actors Studio all by herself". She was very natural and an outstanding comedienne. Director Norman Jewison said, "Doris had wonderful comedic timing. This was, I think, because she had been a singer. People who sing, who have great rhythm — like Sinatra, Dean Martin, Judy Garland — all seem to have better timing than other actors. And that’s why Doris Day became queen of the romantic comedies. She was also an excellent dramatic actress, but because she didn’t have any training, people underestimated her."
I'm still not familiar with her dramatic work and need to see Midnight Lace, Love Me or Leave Me, Storm Warning and The Man Who Knew Too Much, but I have no doubt that her dramatic performances will be good too. I did see her in Young Man With a Horn and loved that film but can't remember now whether her performance was distinctive. (I have no recollection of having seen Midnight Lace and The Man Who Knew Too Much in my youth but my sister thinks we have seen them. As I'm not sure, I will consider both of them unseen.)
Just a note regarding Doris' dancing .... She wanted to become a dancer and had that dream taken away from her because of a car accident. Yet she still could make some of the dream come true by making musicals and getting the opportunity to show her dancing skills and her love of dancing. She said (in Doris Day, Her Own Story), "I never worked harder at anything than I did at the dances in the films. Hours and hours and hours. A film dancer does not have the freedom of a stage dancer. She must dance precisely to a mark. Her turns must be exact. She must face precisely in the camera direction required while executing very difficult steps. And to learn those steps! ... I would drag myself home at night, too tired to move another step, but I kept practising in my head."
While Doris Day became one of the biggest female film stars in the early 1960s and received several awards for her singing, she would receive only one Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for Pillow Talk (she lost to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top). (See here for a full list of awards and nominations received by Day.) Fortunately she did get recognition in the end and won in 1989 the Cecil B. DeMille Award, an honorary Golden Globe Award bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) for "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment".
I'm still not familiar with her dramatic work and need to see Midnight Lace, Love Me or Leave Me, Storm Warning and The Man Who Knew Too Much, but I have no doubt that her dramatic performances will be good too. I did see her in Young Man With a Horn and loved that film but can't remember now whether her performance was distinctive. (I have no recollection of having seen Midnight Lace and The Man Who Knew Too Much in my youth but my sister thinks we have seen them. As I'm not sure, I will consider both of them unseen.)
Just a note regarding Doris' dancing .... She wanted to become a dancer and had that dream taken away from her because of a car accident. Yet she still could make some of the dream come true by making musicals and getting the opportunity to show her dancing skills and her love of dancing. She said (in Doris Day, Her Own Story), "I never worked harder at anything than I did at the dances in the films. Hours and hours and hours. A film dancer does not have the freedom of a stage dancer. She must dance precisely to a mark. Her turns must be exact. She must face precisely in the camera direction required while executing very difficult steps. And to learn those steps! ... I would drag myself home at night, too tired to move another step, but I kept practising in my head."
While Doris Day became one of the biggest female film stars in the early 1960s and received several awards for her singing, she would receive only one Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for Pillow Talk (she lost to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top). (See here for a full list of awards and nominations received by Day.) Fortunately she did get recognition in the end and won in 1989 the Cecil B. DeMille Award, an honorary Golden Globe Award bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) for "outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment".
I haven't really seen that many different Doris Day films, I keep rewatching the ones that I love. So it's really time to explore her filmography further and I would love to spend some more time with her.
Here's a list of the films I've seen so far, in watching order (with the films first seen in childhood I don't know the exact order, but all films I've seen again in my adult years, most of them already multiple times):
*Pillow Talk (first seen in childhood)
*Lover Come Back (childhood)
*Send Me No Flowers (childhood)
*Young At Heart (childhood)
*The Thrill of It All (childhood)
*Calamity Jane (childhood and latest rewatch February 2016)
*It Happened To Jane (rewatched June 2014, don't know when I've seen this for the 1st time but not in childhood)
*That Touch of Mink (July 2015)
*Move Over, Darling (September 2015)
*On Moonlight Bay (December 2015)
*Teacher's Pet (February 2016)
*It Happened To Jane (rewatched June 2014, don't know when I've seen this for the 1st time but not in childhood)
*That Touch of Mink (July 2015)
*Move Over, Darling (September 2015)
*On Moonlight Bay (December 2015)
*Teacher's Pet (February 2016)
*Young Man With a Horn (February 2016)
*By the Light of the Silvery Moon (March 2019)
*Romance On the High Seas (May 2019)
*Tea For Two (May 2019)
*Lullaby of Broadway (May 2019)
After publishing this post, I might continue watching Doris Day films for the remainder of this month. But I will postpone watching her more acclaimed films like Love Me or Leave Me because I'm secretly hoping that the Filmoteca, my favourite place here in Barcelona, will do a tribute next month on the occasion of her passing, and hopefully I will have the opportunity to see Doris on the big screen. Oh I really hope so! Fingers crossed!
Stay tuned for the next post, my round-up of May films, where you can read my thoughts on all Doris films seen this month.
PHOTOS/GIFS IN THIS POST FROM TOP TO BOTTOM:
*Tea For Two (May 2019)
*Lullaby of Broadway (May 2019)
After publishing this post, I might continue watching Doris Day films for the remainder of this month. But I will postpone watching her more acclaimed films like Love Me or Leave Me because I'm secretly hoping that the Filmoteca, my favourite place here in Barcelona, will do a tribute next month on the occasion of her passing, and hopefully I will have the opportunity to see Doris on the big screen. Oh I really hope so! Fingers crossed!
Stay tuned for the next post, my round-up of May films, where you can read my thoughts on all Doris films seen this month.
PHOTOS/GIFS IN THIS POST FROM TOP TO BOTTOM:
*Doris Day with dog;
*Doris Day, singer;
*Doris still recording between films, 1960s;
*Doris Day and Les Brown;
*Doris Day and the album cover Doris Day's Greatest Hits;
*Doris Day;
*Doris Day and Joan Crawford, photo appeared in a magazine article (from Movie TV Secrets, March 1960) entitled Joan Crawford Tells Doris Day How to Save Her Marriage!;
*Doris Day;
*Doris Day and Rock Hudson (he would often visit her in her Malibu home just to relax), 1960;
*Doris Day; (2 photos)
*Romance On the High Seas (1948) with Doris Day.