Laraine Day was the actor Hollywood reached for when its first choice was busy, and she was steadily better than that suggests. Hitchcock’s writers gave her almost nothing in Foreign Correspondent; MGM did much the same for six years.
Fi1m perspective
In Foreign Correspondent (1940), Jones proposes to Laraine Day’s Carol Fisher on a day’s acquaintance, and the film expects her to take it seriously. She does, which is the job. Day spent most of her career doing that job: standing beside a man the studio cared about more, making his behaviour look reasonable, and getting on with it. She was good at it, and it is a pity that was so often all anyone asked.
She began in RKO westerns in the late 1930s under the name Laraine Johnson, signed with MGM in 1939, and the studio found her a uniform. As Nurse Mary Lamont she played the dedicated fiancée through seven Dr Kildare pictures opposite Lew Ayres between 1939 and 1941, and audiences liked her in them, which was rather the problem; a studio that has found a use for you rarely goes looking for another. Hitchcock borrowed her for Foreign Correspondent, and the daughter of a pacifist leader ought to have been a part with an argument in it. Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison and Richard Maibaum wrote her a romance instead, and she is given nothing to do but be charmed, then hurt.
We felt for her in the London stretch, where the plot marks time in hotel corridors and Day is left carrying a courtship the script has not bothered to build. She carries it. She plays hurt plainly, without fluttering or speeches, and the film hurries past her to get back to Holland. It is the kind of thing that sends you looking for the pictures where somebody let her do more.
There are a few. She left MGM in the mid-1940s and went freelance, and the parts improved: Dorothy Bryant opposite Cary Grant in Mr Lucky (1943), then Nancy in The Locket (1946), a kleptomaniac whose story is told in flashbacks within flashbacks, the one role people who remember Day at all tend to remember. Later there was Lydia Rice opposite John Wayne in The High and the Mighty (1954), and television guest parts into the 1980s. She was never a star, and the studios kept her in what were politely called programme pictures.
She said as much herself, late in life: "Metro never really wanted me for anything. I was always the one who happened to be free when their first choice was not." It is a hard thing to say about your own career and, on the evidence, a fair one. Start with Foreign Correspondent, for the chases rather than for her; then find The Locket, the rare occasion a studio handed her a woman with something the matter with her. It is not difficult to guess which she preferred.
Biography
Laraine Day was an American actress. Born La Raine Johnson on 13 October 1920 in Roosevelt, Utah, she was one of eight children in a Mormon family. She moved to California as a child, trained with the Long Beach Players, and made her film debut in 1937.
Day gained prominence in the late 1930s and 1940s, notably as Nurse Mary Lamont opposite Lew Ayres in several Dr Kildare films for MGM. She played Carol Fisher in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), appeared in Mr Lucky (1943) and The Locket (1946), and featured in The High and the Mighty (1954). She also worked in television, with guest roles in series including Murder, She Wrote and Airwolf.
Through her marriage to baseball manager Leo Durocher, Day became known as the "First Lady of Baseball". She was later married to producer Michel Grilikhes and died on 10 November 2007 in Ivins, Utah.
