NEW YORK — Janis Paige, a popular actress in Hollywood and in Broadway musicals and comedies who danced with Fred Astaire, toured with Bob Hope and continued to act into her 80s, has died. She was 101 years old.
Paige died Sunday of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, longtime friend Stuart Lampert said Monday.
Paige starred on Broadway with Jackie Cooper in the mystery comedy “Remains to be Seen” and appeared with John Raitt in the hit musical “The Pajama Game.”
His other films included a Hope comedy, “Bachelor in Paradise”; the Doris Day comedy “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” and “Follow the Boys.”
In 2018, she added her voice to the #MeToo movement, alleging an assault when she was 22 by late department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale.
“I could feel his hands, not just on my breasts, but seemingly everywhere. He was big and strong, and I started fighting, kicking, biting and screaming,” she wrote. “At 95 years old, time is not on my side, nor is silence. I just want to add my name and say, ‘Me too.'”
Paige’s big break came during wartime, when she sang an opera aria for military personnel at the Hollywood Cantina. MGM hired her a day later for a brief role in “Bathing Beauty” — she spoke two lines in the film, starring Esther Williams and Red Skelton — and then dropped her.
On the same day, Warner Bros. hired her and cast her in a dramatic segment of the all-star film “Hollywood Canteen.” Her contract started at $150 per week. “I made more in a week than my mother made in a month during the Great Depression,” she recalled in The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.
Her salary rose to $1,000 a week as the studio kept her busy in light-hearted films like “The Two Guys from Milwaukee,” “The Time, the Place and the Girl,” “Love and Learn,” “Always Together,” “Wallflower.” and “Romance on the High Seas”, which marked Doris Day’s film debut.
Meanwhile, she changed her name from Donna May Tjaden, adopting her grandfather’s name, Paige. She adopted the first name Elsie Janis, famous for entertaining troops in the First World War.
Paige’s contract expired in 1949, at a time when studios were offloading talent because of the invasion of television. “That was a shock,” she commented in 1963. “It meant I was lost at 25.”
She took her talent to Broadway, where she starred in “Remains to Be Seen” (her role would be stolen by June Allyson for the film adaptation) and starred as Babe alongside Raitt as Sid in the original production of “The Pajama Game,” ”Directed in 1954 by George Abbott. (Doris Day would take over her role in the film version.)
MGM producer Arthur Freed saw her perform at a nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and offered her a role opposite Astaire in “Silk Stockings,” also co-starring Cyd Charisse. The film is famous for her and Astaire spoofing new movie tricks in the Cole Porter number “Stereophonic Sound”, including swinging from a chandelier.
“I was a mass of bruises. I didn’t know how to fall. I didn’t know how to sit at the table — I didn’t know how to save myself because I was never a classical dancer,” she told the Miami Herald in 2016.
In May 2003, Paige returned to entertaining after a long absence. She opened a show she called “The Third Act” at San Francisco’s Plush Room. She told stories about Astaire, Frank Sinatra and others and sang songs from their films and musicals.
Chad Jones, critic for the Alameda Times-Star, commented that at 80 “the charming Paige shows a vitality, enthusiasm and spirit that artists half her age would envy.”
Paige grew up in Tacoma, Washington. Her father abandoned the family when she was 4 years old and her mother earned a living at the Tacoma Bank.
“We always had enough to eat,” Paige told the Saturday Evening Post in 1963, “but nothing to spare. My mother worked so hard. And she used to say she wished I’d been born a boy, so she could help more. I always wanted to be a success for her, to make up for my father.”
After leaving Warner Bros., she turned to TV, starring in a 1955-1956 TV series, “It’s Always Jan” and playing recurring roles on “Flamingo Road”, “Santa Barbara”, “Eight Is Enough” , “Capitol”, “Fantasy Island” and “Trapper Jon, MD” In “All in the Family”, she played a waitress who becomes involved with Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker.
Paige replaced Angela Lansbury in the 1968 New York production of “Mame” on Broadway and toured with the show in 1969. She also toured in “Gypsy”, “Annie Get Your Gun”, “Born Yesterday” and “The Desk Set”. . “Her last time on Broadway was in 1984’s “Alone Together.”
She also provided glamor for Hope’s Christmas visits to Cuba and the Caribbean in 1960, Japan and South Korea in 1962, and Vietnam in 1964. She sang in clubs with Sammy Davis Jr., Alan King, Dinah Shore and Perry Como.
She had two brief marriages, to San Francisco restaurateur Frank Martinelli and to writer and producer Arthur Stander. In 1962 she married composer Ray Gilbert, who won an Oscar for the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Da” from Disney’s “Song of the South.” He died in 1976 and she took over management of his record label.
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