Doris Day, the actress whose girl-next-door image helped her to become a huge Hollywood box office draw in the 1950s and ’60s, has been named to receive this year’s Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Although Day stopped acting in the mid-1970s and became a high-profile animal rights advocate, she cultivated a reputation as Hollywood’s virginal sweetheart in a series of romantic comedies including, from 1959, Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson (for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar) and That Touch of Mink (1962). The versatile Day also starred in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much as well as her own network sitcom (The Doris Day Show, 1968-73) before abruptly leaving the business. Previous recipients of LAFCA’s Career Achievement Award include Paul Mazursky, Jerry Lewis, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Richard Widmark, Robert Mulligan, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Ennio Morricone and Conrad L. Hall. Day is the first woman to be honored since Dede Allen in 1999.
