NEW YORK (AP) — Janis Paige, who rose to fame in musicals and comedies in Hollywood and on Broadway, danced with Fred Astaire, toured with Bob Hope and continued performing into her 90s, has died. She was 101 years old.
Page died of old age on Sunday at her Los Angeles home, her longtime friend Stuart Lampert said Monday.
Page co-starred on Broadway alongside Jackie Cooper in the mystery comedy “Remains to be Seen” and opposite John Raitt in the hit musical “Pajama Game.”
Her other film appearances include the comedy Bachelor in Paradise starring Hope, and the comedies Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and Follow the Boys starring Doris Day.
She added her voice to the #MeToo movement in 2018, alleging that she was assaulted by Alfred Bloomingdale, the department store heir who died in 1982, when she was 22.
“I felt his hands everywhere, not just on my chest. He was big and strong and I began to fight back, kick, bite and scream,” she wrote. “At 95, time is not on my side and neither is silence. I just want to add my name and say ‘Me too.'”
Page’s big break came during the war, when she sang opera arias for soldiers at the Hollywood Canteen. MGM hired her the next day for a short role in “Bathing Beauty.” She had only two lines in the film, which starred Esther Williams and Red Skelton, before being fired.
That same day, Warner Bros. signed her to star in a dramatic scene in the all-star film The Hollywood Canteen. Her contract began at $150 a week. “I was making more every week than my mother made in a month during the Great Depression,” she recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.
Her salary rose to $1,000 a week as the studio kept her busy with lighter films like Two Men from Milwaukee, The Time, the Place, and the Girl, Love and Learn, Together We Stay, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Romance on the High Seas, which marked Doris Day’s film debut.
Meanwhile, she changed her name from Donna Mae Jayden to Paige, her grandfather’s name, and her first name was taken from Elsie Janis, famous for providing comfort to soldiers in World War I.
Page’s contract ended in 1949, at a time when the rise of television was causing studios to dump their talent. “It was a shock,” she said in 1963. “It meant that at 25, I was gone.”
She took her talents to Broadway, starring in Remains to Be Seen (June Allyson took her role in the film adaptation) and playing Babe opposite Raitt’s Sid in George Abbott’s original 1954 production of The Pajama Game (Doris Day played the role in the film).
MGM producer Arthur Freed saw her nightclub act at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and offered her a role opposite Astaire in “Silk Stockings,” also starring Cyd Charisse. The film famously parodied movie gimmicks of the time, such as her and Astaire hanging from a chandelier to the Cole Porter song “Stereophonic Sound.”
“I was covered in bruises. I didn’t know how to fall. I didn’t know how to get down on a table. I wasn’t a classical dancer, so I didn’t know how to save myself,” she told the Miami Herald in 2016.
In May 2003, Page returned to show business after a long hiatus, opening a show he called “Third Act” at the Plush Room in San Francisco, telling stories of Astaire, Frank Sinatra and others, and singing songs from his own films and stage musicals.
Alameda Times-Star critic Chad Jones commented that at 80 years old, “the charming Page displays a vigor, vitality and spirit that would be the envy of performers half her age.”
Paige grew up in Tacoma, Washington, where her father abandoned the family when she was four and her mother worked at a Tacoma bank to earn a living.
“We always had enough to eat, but never enough to spare,” Page told The Saturday Evening Post in 1963. “My mother worked very hard, and she always said that if I had been born a boy, I might have been able to help more. I always wanted to succeed for my mother and make up for my father.”
After leaving Warner Brothers, she turned to television, starring in the television series “It’s Always Jan” from 1955 to 1956, and had regular roles in “Flamingo Road,” “Santa Barbara,” “Eight Is Enough,” “Capitol,” “Fantasy Island” and “Trapper Jon, MD.” In “All in the Family,” she played a diner waitress who becomes involved with Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker.
Page undersaw Angela Lansbury in the New York Broadway production of Mame in 1968 and toured with the show in 1969. She also toured in Gypsy, Annie Get Your Gun, Born Yesterday, and Desk Set. Her final Broadway appearance was in Alone Together in 1984.
She also graced Hope’s Christmas visits to Cuba and the Caribbean in 1960, Japan and Korea in 1962, and Vietnam in 1964. She sang in clubs with Sammy Davis Jr., Alan King, Dinah Shore, and Perry Como.
Her autobiography, Reading Between the Lines: A Memoir, was published in 2020 and discusses her connections to Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, David Niven, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable and Lucille Ball.
She was married twice, to San Francisco restaurateur Frank Martinelli and writer and producer Arthur Stander. In 1962 she married songwriter Ray Gilbert, who won an Academy Award for the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from Disney’s Song of the South. When Gilbert died in 1976, she took over running his music company.
