Actress Laraine Day dies in Utah at 87

Laraine Day , a ladylike leading lady who appeared in almost two dozen MGM films between 1939 and 1945, notably as the nurse Mary Lamont in the series of Dr. Kildare movies, died Saturday in Ivins, Utah. She was 87.

For 13 years she was popularly called "the first lady of baseball" for her marriage to Leo Durocher, the Hall of Fame manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants.

Her death, at the home of her daughter, Gigi Bell, was announced by her publicist. She had moved to Utah in March after the death of her third husband, the producer Michel M. Grilikhes, to whom she had been married for 47 years.

Never a major star, Day was relegated to what she called "B(plus) movies" at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She was almost the victim of an ax murderer in "Fingers at the Window" (1942), was married to a traitor in "Yank on the Burma Road" (1942) and served as the intrepid newspaper publisher Edward G. Robinson's girl Friday in "Unholy Partners" (1941).

Day captured roles in A movies only when she was loaned to other studios. In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock borrowed her to co-star with Joel McCrea in the spy thriller "Foreign Correspondent." She was loaned to RKO to play the virtuous society girl who reforms a draft-dodging, gambling ship owner (Cary Grant) in "Mr. Lucky" (1943). And Paramount borrowed her at the request of the director Cecil B. De Mille to play the steadfast nurse at the side of Gary Cooper's heroic doctor in "The Story of Dr. Wassell" (1944).

Paramount had signed Day to a six-month contract at $150 a week after she graduated from high school in 1937. According to an oral history Day taped for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1997, her contract was dropped after she tested for a three-line part in the De Mille film "The Buccaneer." Not only did the director turn her down for the role, she said he also told Paramount that she had no talent and should be dropped.

By the time De Mille was planning a movie based on Dr. Corydon Wassell's rescue of a dozen wounded American sailors during the first days of World War II, Day had played Nurse Mary Lamont seven times. "After seeing me in so many Kildares, I was naturally the only one who could play a nurse and knew the proper instruments," Day said.

Starring Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as the chief of surgery, Dr. Gillespie, the Kildare series was tremendously successful. "Kildare, Maisie and the Andy Hardy pictures were the bread-and-butter pictures for MGM," Day said in her oral history. "Through those three series, they could afford Garbo and Crawford and Shearer, and they could make the big pictures."