Michael Delaney Dowd Jr. (August 11, 1920 – August 11, 2006), known as Mike Douglas, was an American big band singer, entertainer, television talk show host of The Mike Douglas Show, and actor.

Dowd was born in Chicago, Illinois. His birth year has been called into question, with years ranging from 1920 to 1925 having been given as his year of birth at some point. His family later moved to Forest Park, Illinois, where he attended Proviso Township High School, but left the school after his second year. After that, he began singing as a choirboy.

By his teens, Dowd was working as a singer at nightclubs and on a Lake Michigan dinner cruise ship. He was a "staff singer" at the Oklahoma City radio station WKY. After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II on a munitions ship, he resumed his performing career as a staff singer for WMAQ-TV in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles. He was on the Ginny Simms radio show. After that, Douglas joined the big band of Kay Kyser as a singer.

Although big band swing faded from popularity, Kyser had to continue performing due to contractual obligations, and continued to log a few hits with Douglas, including two notable hits, "Ole [or Old] Buttermilk Sky" in 1946 and "The Old Lamp-Lighter" the following year. Kyser was responsible for giving Douglas his show business name, and Douglas continued to perform with the band until Kyser retired in 1951 due to health problems. In 1950, he provided the singing voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney's Cinderella.

In 1953, Douglas was host of Showcase, a weekly program on WGN-TV in Chicago, and he sang on The Music Show on the DuMont Television Network. In 1957 Douglas was one of the Band Singers on Dennis James' "Club 60" a daily talk show on NBC out of Chicago. Douglas and James remained lifelong friends, with James occasionally serving as a co-host on "The Mike Douglas Show" in Los Angeles in the 1970s.^{[citation needed]}

Then living in Burbank, California, Douglas tried to keep his singing career going in the late 1950s working as house singer for a nightclub and traveling to perform elsewhere. By the middle of the decade, rock and roll and doo wop had taken over the charts, which left many older performers in the musical dustbin. In the leanest years, Douglas and his wife survived by successfully "flipping" their Los Angeles homes.

Douglas next appeared in 1961 in Cleveland, where a onetime Chicago colleague hired him for $400 a week as an afternoon television talk-show host at KYW-TV. The Mike Douglas Show rapidly gained popularity, and ultimately, national syndication in August 1963 on other stations owned by KYW-TV's parent company Westinghouse Broadcasting. The show was broadcast live on KYW-TV in its city of origination, but this practice ended in 1965 after guest Zsa Zsa Gabor used the phrase "son of a bitch" when referring to stand-up comedian and comic actor Morey Amsterdam of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Both Douglas and his program relocated to Philadelphia in 1965 after Westinghouse Broadcasting moved KYW-TV's operations to that city, the result of a Federal Communications Commission-ordered reversal of Westinghouse's 1956 station ownership swap with NBC. The Mike Douglas Show aired its first Philadelphia-based show on August 30, 1965; the former KYW-TV in Cleveland, which is now NBC-owned WKYC, continued to carry the program for many years afterward. The format called for Douglas to invite guests to appear as co-hosts for the week; they would be on the show for all five weekdays. Guests ranged from Truman Capote, Richard Nixon, Jerry Lewis, and Edward Everett Horton to The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits and Kiss, with an occasional on-camera appearance by Tim Conway (who would later be discovered at WJW-TV, also in Cleveland). Moe Howard of The Three Stooges was a guest several times, with a pie fight inevitably happening at the end of the interview, and platform speaker on nonverbal communication (body language) Dr. Cody Sweet. The show helped introduce entertainers such as Barbra Streisand and Aretha Franklin.