page_title: Doris Day
section_title: Breakthrough (1955–1958)
hierarchical_section_title: Doris Day / Career / Breakthrough (1955–1958)
caption_attribution_description: English: Cameron Mitchell, Doris Day, and James Cagney in a publicity still for Love Me or Leave Me (1955); republished in this instance for the 1986 airing of the film on the Holiday Network
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: Having become primarily recognized as a musical-comedy actress, Day gradually took on more dramatic roles to broaden her range. Her dramatic star turn as singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), with top billing above James Cagney, received critical and commercial success, becoming Day's biggest hit thus far.  Cagney said she had "the ability to project the simple, direct statement of a simple, direct idea without cluttering it", comparing her to Laurette Taylor's Broadway performance in The Glass Menagerie (1945), one of the greatest performances by an American actor. Day said it was her best film performance. Producer Joe Pasternak said, "I was stunned that Doris did not get an Oscar nomination." The soundtrack album from that movie was a No. 1 hit.
  Day starred in Alfred Hitchcock's suspense film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) with James Stewart. She sang two songs in the film, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" which won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, and "We'll Love Again". The film was Day's 10th movie to be in the Top 10 at the box office. Day played the title role in the thriller/noir Julie (also 1956) with Louis Jourdan.
  After three successive dramatic films, Day returned to her musical/comedic roots in The Pajama Game (1957) with John Raitt. The film was based on the Broadway play of the same name. She worked with Paramount Pictures for the comedy Teacher's Pet (1958), alongside Clark Gable and Gig Young. She co-starred with Richard Widmark and Gig Young in the romantic comedy film The Tunnel of Love (also 1958), but found scant success opposite Jack Lemmon in It Happened to Jane (1959).
  Billboard's annual nationwide poll of disc jockeys had ranked Day as the No. 1 female vocalist nine times in ten years (1949 through 1958), but her success and popularity as a singer was now being overshadowed by her box-office appeal.
caption: Cameron Mitchell, Doris Day, and James Cagney in a publicity still for Love Me or Leave Me (1955)
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