page_title: Doris Day
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Doris Day / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Doris Day Childhood Home, Greenlawn Avenue, Evanston, Cincinnati, OH.
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: Day was born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff on April 3, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of Alma Sophia (née Welz; 1895–1976) and William Joseph Kappelhoff (1892–1967). Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was a music teacher and choirmaster. Her maternal and paternal grandparents were German; her paternal grandfather Franz Joseph Wilhelm Kappelhoff immigrated to the United States in 1875 and settled in Cincinnati which had a large German community with its own churches, clubs, and German-language newspapers. For most of her life, Day stated she was born in 1924; it was not until her 95th birthday – when the Associated Press found her birth certificate, showing a 1922 date of birth – that she stated otherwise. It was common among actresses in Hollywood to state an age younger than they actually were in reality because youth was everything when it came to casting.
  The youngest of three siblings, she had two older brothers: Richard (who died before her birth) and Paul, two to three years older. Due to her father's alleged infidelity, her parents separated. She developed an early interest in dance, and in the mid-1930s formed a dance duo with Jerry Doherty that performed locally in Cincinnati. A car accident on October 13, 1937 injured her right leg and curtailed her prospects as a professional dancer.
caption: Childhood home in Cincinnati
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