Doris Day today: Former Warner Bros. and Universal star is 89.
Doris Day, who turned 89 last April 3 (she was born in Cincinnati in 1924), was a special guest at the Nancy for Frank show – that’s Nancy Sinatra for Frank Sinatra – on SiriusXM Radio channel 71. The Doris Day photo above was posted on Nancy for Frank’s Facebook page and on the Frank Sinatra Family Forum.
The Doris Day special was aired in two parts in late June 2013. The radio show consisted of Nancy Sinatra chatting with Day, in addition to musical interludes featuring Doris Day songs such as “I’ll String You Along with Me,” “But Not for Me,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and “Hooray for Hollywood,” plus two versions of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” – one sang by Day, another sang by Frank Sinatra.
Doris Day and Frank Sinatra made only movie together, Gordon Douglas’ 1954 musical drama Young at Heart, which has nothing in common with the 1938 Janet Gaynor-Douglas Fairbanks Jr. light comedy The Young in Heart. Instead, the Day-Sinatra star vehicle is a remake of another 1938 movie, Michael Curtiz’s family melodrama Four Daughters, with Day in the old Priscilla Lane role, and Sinatra as the John Garfield character. (In the remake, the quartet of daughters/sisters was downsized to a trio, with Dorothy Malone and Elisabeth Fraser as Day’s siblings.)
Doris Day’s leading men
Doris Day and Frank Sinatra weren’t exactly a great screen couple. Perhaps that’s why they never made another movie together.
Day’s more frequent leading men were fellow Warner Bros. contract players Jack Carson (Romance on the High Seas, My Dream Is Yours, It’s a Great Feeling), Gordon MacRae (The West Point Story, Starlift, On Moonlight Bay, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Tea for Two), and Gene Nelson (The West Point Story, Starlift, Lullaby of Broadway, Tea for Two) in the late 1940s/early 1950s; besides fellow Universal contract player Rock Hudson (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Send Me No Flowers) in the late 1950s/early 1960s, and James Garner (Move Over Darling; The Thrill of It All) also in the early ’60s.
Among Doris Day’s other leading men at various studios were Kirk Douglas (Young Man with a Horn), Howard Keel (Calamity Jane), Robert Cummings (Lucky Me), James Cagney (Love Me or Leave Me), James Stewart (The Man Who Knew Too Much), Louis Jourdan (Julie), Clark Gable (Teacher’s Pet), Richard Widmark (The Tunnel of Love), Jack Lemmon (It Happened to Jane), Cary Grant (That Touch of Mink), Stephen Boyd (Billy Rose’s Jumbo), and Rod Taylor (Do Not Disturb).
When she was handed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1989, Day expressed her wish to return to the big screen – adding that she wouldn’t mind working with DeMille Award presenter Clint Eastwood. That, unfortunately, never came to pass. Day would’ve made a cool space cowgirl in Eastwood’s Space Cowboys.
Doris Day was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for the box office hit Pillow Talk (1959). Day’s last movie was the comedy With Six You Get Eggroll, released in 1968. She lives in Carmel, in northern California.