Doris Day

Best known for her perky musicals and virginal comedies such as “Pillow Talk,” the actress also got her day in the sun as a scream queen in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 classic “The Man Who Knew Too Much” — she gets wonderfully hysterical when James Stewart tells her their child has been kidnapped.

But her “scream” masterpiece is 1960’s “Midnight Lace,” a glossy Hitchcockian-type thriller in which she plays a newlywed who lives in London with her handsome, suave husband (Rex Harrison). Soon, she begins to get threatening phone calls. But her husband, friends, her aunt and even the police believe that she’s making up the calls and is actually going insane. In her autobiography, Day says one of the more emotional scenes became too much, triggering her own “sense memory” of being abused by her first husband while she was pregnant. Production had to be temporarily while Day recovered. "I wasn’t acting hysterical," she said, "I was hysterical!"

Decibel level: 9.5