Her only child, son Terry, was born in 1942, and the couple divorced the following year.ĭay’s movie debut, Romance on the High Seas in 1948, was a hit, at least in part because of Day and the Oscar-nominated song she sang in it, “It’s Magic.”Ī series of musicals followed with Day often playing a singer trying to break into the entertainment world: “My Dream Is Yours” in 1949, “It’s a Great Feeling” in 1949 and “Tea for Two” in 1950. She changed her surname at the suggestion of a band leader who heard her sing “Day by Day.”Īt 17, Day married Al Jorden, a trombone player who she later claimed beat her.

She concentrated on singing and at 16 had a job with Les Brown, one of the top orchestra leaders of the day, and recorded her first hit, “Sentimental Journey,” with him. She abandoned that dream after her right leg was broken in an auto accident. She was born Doris von Kappelhoff on April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati and headed to California at age 14 to be a dancer. Doris Day would be true blue, understanding, direct, honest, and even a little sexy.” “Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak? They’d all be trouble. “She’s the girl every guy should marry,” a critic wrote in the Saturday Review.

But I am Miss Chastity Belt and that’s all there is to it.” “My public image is unshakably that of America’s wholesome virgin, the girl next door, carefree and brimming with happiness,” she said in a memoir, “an image, I can assure you, more make-believe than any film part I ever played. She married four times, was divorced three times and widowed once, suffered a nervous breakdown and had severe financial trouble after one husband squandered her money. Day’s life was not always as sunny as her movie roles.

Who sang the song que sera sera