page_title: Doris Day
section_title: Early film career (1948–1954)
hierarchical_section_title: Doris Day / Career / Early film career (1948–1954)
caption_attribution_description: English: Gordon MacRae and Doris Day in the film Starlift (1951), taken from the film's trailer.
context_page_description: Doris Day was an American actress, singer, and animal welfare activist. She began her career as a big band singer in 1939, achieving commercial success in 1945 with two No. 1 recordings, "Sentimental Journey" and "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" with Les Brown & His Band of Renown. She left Brown to embark on a solo career and recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967.
  Day was one of the biggest film stars in the 1950s-1960s era. Day's film career began during the Golden Age of Hollywood with the film Romance on the High Seas. She starred in films of many genres, including musicals, comedies, dramas, and thrillers. She played the title role in Calamity Jane and starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much with James Stewart. Her best-known films are those in which she co-starred with Rock Hudson, chief among them 1959's Pillow Talk, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
context_section_description: While singing with the Les Brown band and for nearly two years on Bob Hope's weekly radio program, she toured extensively across the United States.
  Her performance of the song "Embraceable You" impressed songwriter Jule Styne and his partner, Sammy Cahn, and they recommended her for a role in Romance on the High Seas (1948). Day was cast for the role after auditioning for director Michael Curtiz. She was shocked at being offered the role in the film, and admitted to Curtiz that she was a singer without acting experience. But he said he liked that "she was honest", not afraid to admit it, and he wanted someone who "looked like the All-American Girl". Day was the discovery of which Curtiz was proudest during his career.
  The film provided her with a No. 2 hit recording as a soloist, "It's Magic", which followed by two months her first No. 1 hit ("Love Somebody" in 1948) recorded as a duet with Buddy Clark. Day recorded "Someone Like You", before the film My Dream Is Yours (1949), which featured the song. In 1950, U.S. servicemen in Korea voted her their favorite star.
  She continued to make minor and frequently nostalgic period musicals such as On Moonlight Bay (1951), By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1953), and Tea For Two (1950) for Warner Brothers.
  Her most commercially successful film for Warner was I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), which broke box-office records of 20 years. The film is a musical biography of lyricist Gus Kahn. It was Day's fourth film directed by Curtiz. Day appeared as the title character in the comedic western-themed musical, Calamity Jane (1953). A song from the film, "Secret Love", won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became Day's fourth No. 1 hit single in the United States.
  Between 1950 and 1953, the albums from six of her movie musicals charted in the Top 10, three of them at No. 1. After filming Lucky Me (1954) with Bob Cummings and Young at Heart (1955) with Frank Sinatra, Day chose not to renew her contract with Warner Brothers.
  During this period, Day also had her own radio program, The Doris Day Show. It was broadcast on CBS in 1952–1953.
caption: Gordon MacRae and Day in Starlift (1951)
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0", "Image DateTime": "2009:07:01 19:53:33", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5112", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "566", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "435"}