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The Guardian (13/Nov/2007) - Obituary: Laraine Day

(c) The Guardian (13/Nov/2007)

Obituary: Laraine Day

Famous as Dr Kildare's screen fiancee, she starred in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent

In 1940, Laraine Day, who has died aged 90, was voted the most promising film star by American distributors. It was the year in which the 23-year-old made an impression in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent and was gaining a large following as Mary Lamont, the dedicated nurse and fiancee of Dr Kildare, in the popular MGM hospital series. Yet, five years later, Day requested a release from her contract at the studio. "Metro never really wanted me for anything," she explained. "I was always the one who happened to be free when their first choice was not."

The elegant brunette was never able to find a distinctive screen image after being killed off in the Dr Kildare series. Ironically, in the 1950s, when Day was semi-retired and married to Leo Durocher, the colourful manager of the New York Giants baseball team, she became known to the American public at large as "the first lady of baseball". As she remarked at the time: "Let someone else be the world's greatest actress. I'll be the world's greatest baseball fan."

Day was born LaRaine Johnson in Utah, one of eight children of a wealthy grain dealer. Her grandfather had been a prominent Mormon pioneer leader and the father of 52 children by various wives. Day, who never smoked, drank or swore, retained her Mormon faith throughout her life.

She began her stage career with the Long Beach Players after her family moved to Long Beach, California, in 1931, later taking her screen name from Elias Day, the playhouse manager. A talent scout saw her there and got her a contract with the Goldwyn studios, for whom she made her cinema debut in the celebrated Barbara Stanwyck drama, Stella Dallas (1937). As a girl at a soda fountain, she had four lines, but she was soon dropped because she "lacked talent".

Luckily, RKO offered her the female lead, billed as Laraine Johnson, opposite George O'Brien in three minor westerns: Border G-Men, Painted Desert and Arizona Legion, before she went to MGM in 1939 and became Laraine Day. Her first role there was as a lively Irish lass, the adopted daughter of cop Wallace Beery in Sergeant Madden. In the same year, she made the first of seven appearances as Nurse Lamont in Calling Dr Kildare, providing Dr Kildare (Lew Ayres) with romance in his busy life.

As a pleasant relief from her nursing duties at the fictional Blair general hospital, Day was lent out to United Artists for Hitchcock's second Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent (1940). She played the daughter of Herbert Marshall, who heads a peace organisation, although she does not know that it is a front for fifth columnists. Joel McCrea, on the run with her from Nazi agents, says: "I'm in love with you and I want to marry you." She replies: "I'm in love with you and I want to marry you!" "That cuts our love scene down quite a bit, doesn't it?" he retorts. It was her best role, although Hitch did little to develop her character.

Immediately afterwards, also for UA, Day was offered the part of the tragic girl who commits suicide in My Son, My Son, after Frances Dee collapsed on set. Then it was back to MGM and Nurse Lamont until Dr Kildare's Wedding Day (1941), in which Kildare is about to marry her when she is hit by a truck and dies after telling her bereaved fiance: "This is going to be much easier for me than for you. Poor, sweet, Jimmy." MGM claimed that she was written out of the series because they had bigger plans for her. In fact, they wanted to make room for new contractees Donna Reed and Ann Ayars.

Day's performance was so affecting that the studio was inundated with letters from grieving fans. In order to console them, MGM cast her again opposite Lew Ayres in Fingers at the Window (1942), hoping to create a husband-and-wife detective duo to rival The Thin Man. However, Ayres became a conscientious objector and was dropped by the studio.

Loaned out again, Day was excellent as a rich socialite whom gambler Cary Grant tries to fleece in Mr Lucky (1943), and, in Cecil B DeMille's The Story of Dr Wassell (1944), she provided sterling support as a nurse to Gary Cooper's missionary doctor in Java during the war.

As a departure from her noble heroines, Day, now a freelance, played a psychologically disturbed woman who wrecks the lives of four men in The Locket (1946). Although she seemed a most unlikely femme fatale, it worked. Playing a half-Spanish woman who falls for engineer John Wayne in Tycoon (1947), Day looked half-exotic in garish Technicolor. In the same year, she gained a Mexican divorce from dance-band singer James Ray Hendricks, and married Leo Durocher, 15 years her senior. "My life is now Mrs Leo Durocher and baseball comes first," she declared. Nevertheless, she still made a few films.

She failed to reveal a gift for comedy in the title role in My Dear Secretary (1948), in which Kirk Douglas chases his secretaries around his desk, but meets his match. The moral of the unintentionally funny The Woman on Pier 13 (aka I Married a Communist, 1949) was: "It's better to be dead than red."

In the 1950s, she wrote a book, The America We Love, had a TV sports series, Double Play with Durocher and Day, and The Laraine Day Show. She also appeared in The High and the Mighty (1954), and was courted by Jeff Chandler in Toy Tiger (1956). In 1960, she divorced Durocher and married TV producer Michel Grilikhes, who died earlier this year.

As well as being spokeswoman for the Make America Better programme, Day continued to be deeply involved in the Mormon church. "It gives me strength in a confusing world," she said.

She is survived by a son and daughter from her marriage to Durocher and two daughters from her marriage to Grilikhes.

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