Early Life
Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Evanston to Alma Sophia (née Welz, a housewife) and William Kappelhoff (a music teacher and choir master) on April 3, 1922. All of her grandparents were German immigrants. In Doris Day: Her Own Story, the actress, who claims to have been born in 1924, asserted that she "was named by my mother in honor of her favorite actress, Doris Kenyon, a silent screen star of that year 1924." However the 1940 U.S. census (enumerated on April 10, 1940), gives her age as 18.
The youngest of three siblings, she had two older brothers: Richard (who died before her birth) and Paul, several years older. Due to her father's alleged infidelity, her parents separated. She developed an early interest in dance, and in the mid-1930s formed a dance duo with Jerry Doherty that performed locally in Cincinnati. A car accident on October 13, 1937, damaged her legs and curtailed her prospects as a professional dancer.
Read more about this topic: Doris Day
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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