Doris Day, the singer, actress and animal activist whose career began in the late 1930s when she sang for multiple big bands, died today in Carmel, Calif., of complications from pneumonia. She was 97.

Known for playing overly innocent roles in 1960s films, Day’s film career followed and then ran parallel with a singing career in which she was among America’s top draws.

Born Doris Kappelhoff, she started singing on radio and at nightclubs as a teenager in her native Ohio. At 17, she got her start with Bob Crosby before moving over to front Les Brown’s Band of Renown, where she recorded the classic “Sentimental Journey” for Columbia in 1945 and spent two years performing on Bob Hope’s radio show. She was especially popular with G.I.s during and after World War II.

When she left Brown’s band in 1946, Day was considered on the premier vocalists in the country and by 1967, she would record more than 650 songs.

Unhappy marriages, however, had her considering rejecting a life in the music business business and returning to Ohio when songwriter Sammy Cahn got her an audition for director Michael Curtiz for the film Romance on the High Seas. She got the part and began a film career that would include 39 pictures between 1948 and 1968, among them Young Man With a Horn, The Pajama Game, Pillow Talk and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.

Day was very much a jazz singer in the 1940s but as her tandem singing and acting career took off, she would often sing more pop-oriented material in films that would be released in as singles. Romance on the High Seas yielded two hits, “It’s Magic” and “Love Somebody” in 1948; the Oscar-winning “Secret Love,” from 1953’s Calamity Jane, earned Day her fourth #1; and most famously, “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”—also an Oscar winner—came from the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Day released 18 albums between 1949 and 1965. She returned to jazz singing on the 1962 album Duet with Andre Previn and his trio.

“Throughout her illustrious career she recorded several hits, including the Grammy Hall of Fame-inducted songs ‘Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)’ and "Secret Love," and was honored with the Recording Academy’'s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 for her significant impact on the music industry,” Recording Academy President/CEO Neil Portnow said. “Her infectious spirit and vibrant works of art have made a lasting impression worldwide. She will be missed, but her incredible legacy will live on forever.”

Her records were especially popular in the U.K. where “Secret Love” went to #1 in 1954 and spent 29 weeks on the singles chart, and “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” topped the chart for six weeks in 1956. She had 15 Top 30 singles in Blighty.

When she released My Heart in 2011, it went to #9 in the U.K., making Day, then 89, the oldest singer to go Top 10 with an album of new recordings.

Day recorded for Columbia, did a radio show for CBS in 1952 and ’53, and made films for Warner Bros. until the mid-1950s, after which she alternated between dramatic roles and musicals for various studios.

At the dawn of the rock & roll era, Day was one of the top-earning—and among the highest paid—singers in the country. She topped various popularity polls between 1949 and 1958 as a singer, but her pull at the box office started to attract her attentions to film work.

She starred in The Doris Day Show beginning in 1968 and running for five seasons before retiring and moving to Carmel, Calif., where she started the Doris Day Animal Foundation.