The flexible and enduring performer Janis Paige, known for her starring purpose in the Tony-winning 1954 musical “The Pajama Game” and her scene-stealing effectiveness in the 1957 movie musical “Silk Stockings,” has died.
A important star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Paige died Sunday of organic brings about in her Los Angeles house, her longtime good friend Stuart Lampert verified to the Related Press. She was 101.
A redheaded triple-danger, Paige expended the 1940s as a person of the busiest actors in Jack Warner’s stable. By the 1950s, she was as well known for her sex enchantment as she was for her sass, on Broadway, television and touring nationally as a singer on the nightclub circuit.
Born Donna Mae Tjaden on Sept. 16, 1922, in Tacoma, Clean., Paige was a gifted singer as a baby, executing at neighborhood newbie shows. Her mother and father divorced throughout the Despair, and Paige’s mother elevated her and her sister by itself.
Paige carried out in theater productions in superior university, then just after graduation she and her mom moved to Los Angeles to see if she could make it as a performer.
She took a career serving sandwiches and espresso at the Phase Door Canteen in Hollywood and 1 night was questioned to fill in for an absent singer. An assistant for studio main Louis B. Mayer saw her carry out, and the following working day she had a agreement with Metro Goldwyn Mayer — and a new title.
Paige was instantly forged opposite Crimson Skelton in a large-profile dance variety in the 1944 Esther Williams musical “Bathing Beauties.” As was customary with studio contract gamers, Paige was entered in a series of splendor contests to build publicity.
In no time at all, she was signed away to Warner Bros. and forged as a studio guidebook in the Oscar-nominated hit “Hollywood Canteen.” There she built extra than a dozen movies, which include portraying a saloon singer in the 1947 western “Cheyenne” and a suspicious wife in Doris Day’s 1948 film debut, “Romance On the Significant Seas.”
But Paige thrived in musicals and struggled to uncover gratifying roles as the genre fell out of favor. The studio dropped her in 1951.
“One working day I was asked to arrive in and see Mr. Warner,’’ she recalled to the New York Publish in 2016. “He said, ‘Janis, I just wished to permit you know we’re allowing you go when your deal is up in May possibly. We just never know what to do with you, simply because you’re so offbeat.’ I burst into tears.’’
But Paige was absolutely nothing if not a survivor. Broke and recently divorced, she toured her possess nightclub act to shell out the expenses and quickly landed on Broadway, wherever she turned a star on her personal phrases in the nicely-received comedy-mystery “Remains to be Seen” opposite Jackie Cooper in 1951 and “The Pajama Game” in 1954.
When the lead roles in the screen adaptations of those people productions went to other actors, Paige went to tv, showing in her possess CBS sitcom, “It’s Generally Jan.” She continued to tour as a singer, undertaking with Bob Hope’s USO displays and using frequent gigs in Las Vegas, in New York and at the previous Ambassador Lodge in Los Angeles.
Although headlining at that hotel’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Paige was made available a starring part in the 1957 Fred Astaire musical “Silk Stockings.” In that film, Paige was cast as the fiery primary girl to Astaire’s producer and in one particular variety discovered herself pretty much swinging from a chandelier.
“I wouldn’t dare say no to Fred Astaire,” she instructed the Miami Herald in 2016. “Especially when … you have to capture the chandelier and swing out about all these people. He showed me and explained, ‘You assume you can do that?’ And I reported, ‘Sure, I can do that.’ Not understanding if I was likely to slide on my confront or not. I didn’t.”
Although Paige’s major movie roles ongoing to wane, she starred 2 times on Broadway in the 1960s, in the musical “Here’s Love” and the primary 1968 Broadway generation of “Mame.” She also toured with productions of “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Sweet Charity” and “Guys and Dolls.”
In the 1970s, Paige managed Ipanema Tunes Corp., the songs publishing organization she inherited from her late partner, Oscar-successful composer Ray Gilbert. She also guest-starred on significant-profile Television displays, famously enjoying a diner waitress who kisses Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Paige co-starred on daytime cleaning soap operas “Capitol,” “General Hospital” and “Santa Barbara.” In 2012, at 89, Paige executed an autobiographical a single-female cabaret present in West Hollywood, San Francisco and New York.
In a 2017 visitor column in the Hollywood Reporter, Paige alleged that division keep heir Alfred S. Bloomingdale had sexually assaulted her in 1944. She wrote the column to exhibit aid for other gals who experienced occur ahead with their own stories of sexual harassment in Hollywood in the course of the early times of the #MeToo movement.
“The unrelenting barrage of sexual-abuse accusations levied at the uber-loaded and all-impressive Harvey Weinstein opened up my own recollections,” she wrote. “Even at 95, I bear in mind almost everything. Closure is never ever entire.”
Paige was married a few times, divorcing twice. Her husband died in 1976. She experienced no little ones.
Piccalo is a previous Occasions workers author.
