Laraine Day

Laraine Day born La Raine Johnson was a major movie star of the 1940s and 50s Raised in Utah as part of a prominent Mormon family she came to Hollywood as a young woman and made her film debut with an uncredited role in Stella Dallas Before she was famous she also played the birthmother of Tarzan and Janes adopted son Boy in Tarzan Finds a Son Her break came in 1939 with the wildly popular Dr Kildare sequels Day played Kildares nurse and love interest in the third through ninth Kildare movies until her character married the doctor in Dr Kildares Wedding Day As Mrs Kildare she was written out of the next and last Kildare feature In 1942 she starred with Ayres again in the underrated axe murder melodrama Fingers at the Window Over subsequent decades her memorable films included the flashbackwithinflashbackwithinflashback drama The Locket the gangster comedy Mr Lucky and the campy paranoia piece I Married A Communist She was among the allstar passengers in the overwrought airlinerinperil drama The High and the Mighty and in Hitchcocks Foreign Correspondent it was Day who encouraged Joel McCrea to give his stirring report of the air raid at the films climax Hitchcocks thinlyveiled plea for America to enter World War II When television became a viable income source Day found the small screen more inviting and less timeconsuming than making movies and she became primarily a TV actress She had a 15minute series of uplifting vignettes called Daydreaming with Laraine and another 15minute daily celebrity chat show called The Laraine Day Show Married to New York Giants manager Leo Durocher Day became one of TVs first female sports reporters when she hosted Day with the Giants an early 1950s baseball talk show with Giants players that aired on New York Citys Channel 11 Her last film was a lowbudget thriller The Third Voice in 1960 but she continued taking occasional guest roles on TV series Love Boat Fantasy Island Murder She Wrote etc through the mid1980s Following her retierment she spent the remainder of her life active in the Mormon church Republican politics and various charity related work Upon the death of her third husband Michael Grilikhes in March 2007 she moved back to her native Utah where she died that November at age 87 She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Hollywood Hills Los Angeles CA