Laraine Day

Known for ActingBorn 1920-10-13Died 2007-11-10Roosevelt, Utah, USA

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 birth-mother of Tarzan and Jane's adopted son "Boy" in Tarzan Finds a Son. Her break came in 1939, with the wildly popular "Dr Kildare" sequels. Day played Kildare's nurse and love interest in the third through ninth Kildare movies, until her character married the doctor in Dr. Kildare's 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 flashback-within-flashback-within-flashback drama The Locket, the gangster comedy Mr Lucky, and the campy paranoia piece I Married A Communist. She was among the all-star passengers in the overwrought airliner-in-peril drama The High and the Mighty, and in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent it was Day who encouraged Joel McCrea to give his stirring report of the air raid at the film's climax Hitchcock's thinly-veiled plea for America to enter World War II. When television became a viable income source, Day found the small screen more inviting and less time-consuming than making movies, and she became primarily a TV actress. She had a 15-minute series of uplifting vignettes called Daydreaming with Laraine, and another 15-minute daily celebrity chat show called The Laraine Day Show. Married to New York Giants manager Leo Durocher, Day became one of TV's 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 City's Channel 11. Her last film was a low-budget 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 mid-1980s. 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.Read more

Movies & web series

Swiss Family Robinson

Those Endearing Young Charms

Pursuit

Airwolf

Twenty Years After

The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Scandal Street

Murder, She Wrote

The New Breed

Think First

Unholy Partners

Sergeant Madden

Your Show of Shows

Schlitz Playhouse of Stars

The Name of the Game

Hotel

Screen Director's Playhouse

What's My Line?

Toy Tiger

The People Vs. Dr. Kildare

Foreign Correspondent

Mr. Lucky

General Electric Theater

Stella Dallas

A New Romance of Celluloid: The Miracle of Sound

Dr. Kildare's Wedding Day

Lux Video Theatre

Dr. Kildare Goes Home

Bride by Mistake

Journey for Margaret

And One Was Beautiful

Letter to Loretta

The Love Boat

Dr. Kildare's Crisis

Three for Jamie Dawn

Medical Center

The Glass Key

Calling Dr. Kildare

The Trial of Mary Dugan

Burke's Law

The Story of Dr. Wassell

The Sixth Sense

The Locket

Return to Fantasy Island

Murder on Flight 502

My Dear Secretary

Keep Your Powder Dry

Tarzan Finds a Son!