by Nathaniel R
"Legend" and "Icon" and "Classic" are all overused words in showbiz prose, and we're as guilty of anyone at letting those words fly out with abandon. But they're nothing like overstatements when it comes to the career of Doris Day, one of the 20th Century's most beloved and successful stars. She began her career as a teenage big band singer and nine years later debuted on the big screen in her most regular genre, the romantic comedy (with or without songs) via Busby Berkeley's Romance on the High Seas (1948).
She was an instant hit with audiences but it took a few more years for her true classics to emerge...
The bulk of the film's she's best remembered for occurred across a fifteen year window, which is somewhat typical of legendary stars output, reaching from the musical comedy western Calamity Jane (1953) through the blended-family comedy With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), which incidentally arrived one year before The Brady Bunch ran with a similar concept of remarriage and sudden double-size families as a TV series. For Doris Day it was hit after hit after hit in the 1950s and 1960s with the romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959, her sole Oscar nomination) and the Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) taking pride of place in terms of the film's enduring reputations.
Day was sometimes referred to as a "professional virgin" as a film star, shorthand for her chaste screen persona but she was not sexless so the term is misleading; you don't get that famous and beloved doing romantic comedies if you are. She could flirt with the best of them onscreen. It remains fascinating to us that her most popular period stretched from the early 50s where her screen persona felt most markedly 'contemporary' through the much bawdier and sexually liberated 1960s when her more apple-cheeked persona was in direct contrast to the Elizabeth Taylors, Shirley Maclaines, Sophia Lorens, Catherine Deneuves, and Julie Christies of the time period, if not the Julie Andrews.
Though Day was never an awards magnet in her lifetime outside of the Golden Globes (where she was a regular nominee and four-time honoree) there was a great push from her loyal fandom for career and lifetime achievement awards and she took home four high profile honors in those terms from the LAFCA, the Golden Globes, the Grammys, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. An Honorary Oscar never came to pass and most believed it was because she wouldn't appear in person to accept it. She turned down similar honors including the Kennedy Center lending credence to those rumors.
After her heyday, which ended with a five year TV series The Doris Day Show (1968-1973), Day didn't bother trying to hold on to her showbiz fame (but for a brief return to TV in the mid 80s when she famously interviewed her frequent co-star Rock Hudson, then reinventing himself as a primetime soap star) but opted for retirement and philanthrophy, where she became well known as a champion of animal rights. She garnered some negative publicity, too, for her conservative politics but why focus on that when she saved so many doggies? And Republicans then are hardly synonymous with republicans now. They weren't even half as cancerous and blatantly evil as they are in today's political climate.
Some Lists For Fun...
BIGGEST HITS (very rough estimated rank)
Pillow Talk (1959) was so successful that Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, and Doris made two more pictures as a trio: Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964)
- Pillow Talk (1959)
- That Touch of Mink (1962)
- Move Over, Darling (1963)
- The Thrill of It All (1963)
- The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
- Lover Come Back (1961)
- I'll See You In My Dreams (1951)
- With Six You Get Eggroll (1968)
- Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960)
- Love Me Or Leave Me (1955)
MOST FREQUENT CO-STARS (estimated. correct us if we left someone out)
West Point Story (1953) with Gordon MacRae, her most frequent co-star
- Gordon MacRae (6 times)
- S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall, and Gene Nelson (4 times each)
- Rock Hudson, Tony Randall, Jack Carson, James Cagney, Bill Goodwin (3 times each)
- Eve Arden, Paul Lynde, Gig Young, and Janis Paige (2 times each)
Do you remember the first time you fell for Doris Day?
I think my first encounter was Calamity Jane on a TV showing because her rendition of "Secret Love" has been seared into my brain for as long as I can remember being alive. I also distinctly remember With Six You Get Eggroll from TV airings. Pillow Talk I only discovered in college while trying to catch up on Oscar nominations. What a treat that movie was and remains, even if it's the last kind of movie you'd expect to be up for Oscars. Hence the deliciousness.