Actress Laraine Day dies in Utah at 87

Years after "good, marvelous, true, honest" Nurse Lamont was hit by a truck while rushing to buy furniture on her wedding day, people would stop Day on the street and ask, "Why did you die, Mary Lamont?"

Although some sources give Day's birthday as Oct. 13, 1917, the more likely date and the one given on her death is 1920. One of eight children, including a twin brother, she was born Laraine Johnson in Roosevelt, Utah, to a prosperous family that belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When he was 15, her father had acted as a Mormon Paul Revere, riding to warn polygamists that the federal marshals were coming so that they could hide their wives. Her great-grandfather, three of his six wives and a few dozen of his 52 children had been early settlers in San Bernardino, Calif. The Johnsons followed two of their older sons to the area when Day was 9.

Soon moving to Long Beach, Day took storefront tap dance lessons at 12 and, while still in high school, started her movie career with a bit part in the four-handkerchief melodrama of maternal love "Stella Dallas" (1937). As an uncredited "Girl at Resort," she ordered and ate a banana split with three scoops of ice cream. Then she ate six more, since the director, King Vidor, was not satisfied until the scene was shot seven times.

After three made-in-two-weeks Westerns opposite George O'Brien at RKO ("Border G-Men," "Painted Desert," and "Arizona Legion,") she was signed by MGM in 1939, and her name was changed; the studio already had a Rita Johnson under contract. She had one line before dying in a plane crash in "Tarzan Finds a Son" (1939) and committed suicide in "I Take This Woman," (1940), starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr. Loaned to Edward Small Productions when Frances Dee collapsed on the set of "My Son, My Son," (1940), she killed herself again rather than ruin Brian Aherne's life. Her performance in that film made theater owners pick her as an outstanding new actress, and Life magazine called her "a major young Hollywood personality."

"Metro did nothing. No publicity," Day said. The MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer showed no interest in her, she said in her oral history, until she married Leo Durocher. "Then we were invited to his house because he was so crazy about baseball." By then, Day had left MGM.

During her years at MGM, she made headlines only once, when she was instrumental in changing Army policy toward entertainers who visited army camps. She had insisted that she be allowed to mingle with enlisted men as well as officers. On a three-day tour of 14 camps, she protested that she had seen only 1,000 of 30,000 enlisted men but had been formally introduced to each of the 300 officers.