Janis Paige born September 16, 1922

Janis Paige (September 16, 1922 – June 2, 2024) was an American actress and singer. With a career spanning nearly 60 years, she was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood who shone in films and numerous television shows.

Paige was born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington state. Her parents, George and Hazel, separated when she was four, a year before she started singing in public in local amateur shows. After graduating from high school, Donna and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where she was soon spotted by a Warner Bros talent scout and given a contract, adopting Janis Paige as her stage name. Paige’s film career started with a walk on part in Hollywood Canteen (1944) after which Warner Bros, cast her mainly as the heroine’s best friend or as the flirtatious “other woman”, often linked with the humorous character actor Jack Carson.

Among the films for the duo were Romance on the High Seas (1948), Day’s debut feature, in which Paige played Elvira Kent, and a few light-hearted musical comedies teaming Carson and the tenor Dennis Morgan (Warners’ answer to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby), namely Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946), The Time, The Place and the Girl (1946) and One Sunday Afternoon (1948). She also played the part of innocent Sally Athelny, who contrasted with the worldly waitress Mildred Rogers (Eleanor Parker) in Of Human Bondage (1946), the second film version of the Somerset Maugham novel. In a change of tone were two westerns, Cheyenne (1947), starring Morgan and Jane Wyman, in which Paige was a saloon girl, and The Younger Brothers (1949), as the nasty ring leader of a gang of outlaws.

                                  

Paige was dissatisfied with the quality of her roles and the pictures, and after seven years this prompted her to leave Warner Bros. However, Paige’s initial acting persona was soon to change. Her greatest triumph came in the Richard Adler/Jerry Ross Tony award-winning Broadway musical The Pajama Game in 1954. Paige created the role of “Babe” Williams, the spirited leader of the union grievance committee at the Sleep Tite pajama factory, vigorously belting out the numbers I’m Not at All in Love, Small Talk and There Once Was a Man. It is likely that her fame would have widened even more had she reprised the role of Babe in the 1957 film version of the Pajama Game. Initially, Warner Bros wanted to transfer the entire stage company to the screen, with the proviso that one of the two leads had to be a well-known movie star. Unfortunately for Paige, the studio offered her role to Doris Day when Frank Sinatra turned down the male lead, which was taken by the relatively unknown John Raitt.

As compensation for losing out to Day on The Pajama Game movie, Paige was third-billed (under Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse) in Rouben Mamoulian’s film version of the Cole Porter hit Broadway musical Silk Stockings, released in 1957. In it, Paige, as a seductive Hollywood film star, genially takes off Esther Williams, MGM’s swimming sensation, periodically hitting the side of her head as if to get water out of her ears. Paige delivers three self-mocking show-stopping numbers, in one of which, Stereophonic Sound, she dances with Astaire. The other numbers are Josephine, a song from a putative vulgar musical based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Satin and Silk, which eulogises the importance of the right underwear. Paige was given a star in the Motion Picture section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6624 Hollywood Boulevard on February 9, 1960.

Astaire & Paige in Silk Stockings

After Silk Stockings, Paige made rare visits to the big screen. The few exceptions were Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), in which she wittily portrayed a Broadway star who makes a play for an acerbic theatre critic (David Niven), much to the chagrin of his wife (Day); and The Caretakers (1963), set in a psychiatric hospital run by an over-the-top Joan Crawford. By then, Paige’s long television career was well under way. She had her own sitcom, It’s Always Jan (1955-56), and became a very familiar face for a further six decades, appearing in almost any series one cares to name.

Janis Paige in Mame

Her singing voice and vibrant personality were perfectly suited when she replaced Angela Lansbury on Broadway in Mame in 1968, and toured in shows including Gypsy, Applause, Annie Get Your Gun and Guys and Dolls. In the 1970's she was seen in Columbo, Banacek, Police Story, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Hawaii Five-O, Charlies Angels & The Rockford Files to name but a few. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was seen on several soap operas, including Capitol (1987, as Sam Clegg's first wife, Laureen), General Hospital (1989–1990, as Katharine Delafield's flashy Aunt Iona, a lady counterfeiter), and Santa Barbara (1990–1993, replacing Dame Judith Anderson as matriarch Minx Lockridge). Her last film appearance was in the 1994 thriller "Natural Causes". Her last television appearance was in a 2001 episode of the legal drama series Family Law.

She was married three times and divorced twice. Her third husband, the lyricist Ray Gilbert, died in 1976. Paige turned 100 on September 16, 2022, and died at her Los Angeles home on June 2, 2024, at the age of 101.

(Edited from Ronald Bergan Guardian obit & Wikipedia)