Doris Day dies; legendary actress and singer was 97
LOS ANGELES - Doris Day, a leading box office star of the mid-20th century who achieved indelible fame in big-screen bedroom farces and put a sunny face on the working woman in postwar America, has died. She was 97.
The Doris Day Animal Foundation confirmed Day died early Monday at her Carmel Valley, Calif., home. The foundation said she was surrounded by close friends.
"Day had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia, resulting in her death," the foundation said in an emailed statement.
A former big-band singer and recording star who walked away from Hollywood in the early 1970s, Day had spent most of the last years in her beloved Carmel, where she was an outspoken animal rights activist.
When the light musicals she was originally known for began falling out of fashion in the late 1950s, she modernized herself by playing working women in romantic comedies.
With a bubbly screen presence and a blinding smile, Day effectively traded barbs with leading men and marched into the workplace in such lighthearted films as "Pillow Talk" (1959) and "Lover Come Back" (1961), two of the three films she made with Rock Hudson.
The transformation was box office gold. She received
