Los Angeles, .- Doris Day, the actress and singer who spell for decades the hearts of a country with his dream voice and angelic appearance, died today at 97 years old, as reported today by the foundation that bears his name.
“Day was in excellent physical condition for his age until, recently, he contracted a severe case of pneumonia that resulted in his death,” said a statement from the Doris Day Animal Foundation.
The singer of “Que Sera, Sera” and starring in films with Cary Grant, James Stewart and Frank Sinatra, among other Hollywood celebrities, was one of the biggest movie stars of the 50s and 60s and, even Today, she is considered one of the actresses with the most hook at the box office of all time.
He formed a period couple with Rock Hudson in “Pillow Talk”, “Lover Come Back” and “Send Me No Flowers”, comedies that became a genre in itself.
“I think the reason why people liked our movies is because they could really appreciate how much we loved each other, it was something that went through the screen, it was a good friend,” the actress told People magazine in 2015.
During his career he recorded more than 600 songs, with hits like “Sentimental Journey”, “Love Somebody”, “It’s Magic”, “A Guy Is A Guy” and “Secret Love”, he won an honorary Grammy, an Oscar nomination (“Pillow Talk”) and was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe Award.
Doris Mary Ann Von Kapplehoff was born on April 3, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of a housewife and a music teacher, both of German origin. Since she was a child, like so many other girls at her age, she knew that she wanted to be an artist. And nothing was going to stop her.
Not even when, at age 14 and after deciding that she would try her luck in Hollywood as a dancer, she suffered, the night before traveling to her dream, a traffic accident that cut her off forever and kept her two years bedridden.
The young woman knew how to remake and reinvent. He took singing lessons and found a new vocation, which took him at age 17 to embark on a tour with Les Brown Band. There he met Al Jorden, the trombonist of the formation, with whom he married in 1941 and became the father of his first son, Terry.
Jorden’s violent episodes brought the marriage to a halt two years later, and Day remarried saxophonist George Weidler, a union that broke up in less than a year.
Plunged into a great emotional instability, saw the light when he signed a contract with Warner Bros., whose executives were able to appreciate the beauty, voice and effervescent personality of the young, perfect for the romantic comedies that would star in later.
One of those executives became her third husband, agent and producer Martin Melcher, who would mark, for better and for worse, the rest of her career.
They were the first steps of a cinematographic trajectory that would reach great heights with the success of “Calamity Jane” and tapes like “Lucky Me”, “Love Me or Leave Me”, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, “Pillow Talk”, “Please Do not Eat the Daisies,” “Do Not Disturb,” “The Glass Bottom Boat,” “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” and “With Six You Get Eggroll”, among others.
The interpreter, whose decline coincided with the arrival of the sexual revolution, had entered into a spiral of projects that did not particularly interest her.
Exhausted and without the motivation of previous years, she received a severe blow with the death of her husband in 1968 and decided that she would never shoot a single film again.
Her husband, before dying and without consulting the actress, had signed an agreement for Day to have her own television series, “The Doris Day Show”.
Day entrusted her completely until 1973 partly to alleviate the economic waste of Melcher, who had squandered the couple’s fortune with bad investments and had left the artist with a huge debt.
In addition, he sued Melcher’s partner and attorney, Jerome Rosenthal, and received $ 6 million in compensation for fraud.
After that bitter episode, Day only returned to television to make sporadic appearances.
In 1976 he married for the fourth time with Barry Comden, the meter of one of his favorite restaurants, to which he joined his passion for animals.
In 1980 they divorced and Comden argued, precisely, that Day cared more for animals than for him.
The actress, who in 2011 surprised with the release of the album “My Heart”, had since her withdrawal from film and television a quiet and relaxed life in Carmel (California), devoted to the Doris Day Animal League institution for the care of pets. (EFEUSA)
