Versatile and enduring performer Janis Paige, known for her starring role in the 1954 Tony-winning musical “The Pajama Game” and her scene-stealing performance in the 1957 musical film “Silk Stockings,” has died.
Paige, a key star of Hollywood's Golden Age, died Sunday of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, her longtime friend Stuart Lampert confirmed to the Associated Press. She was 101 years old.
A triple-threat redhead, Paige spent the 1940s as one of the busiest actors in Jack Warner's stable. In the 1950s, she was as famous for her sex appeal as she was for her sass, on Broadway, television, and touring nationally as a singer on the nightclub circuit.
Born Donna Mae Tjaden on September 16, 1922 in Tacoma, Washington, Paige was a talented singer as a child and performed in local amateur shows. Her parents divorced during the Depression and Paige's mother raised her and her sister alone.
Paige performed in theater productions in high school and then after graduating, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles to see if she could make it as a performer.
He took a job serving sandwiches and coffee at the Stage Door Canteen in Hollywood and one night he was asked to fill in for an absent singer. An assistant to studio head Louis B. Mayer saw her perform and the next day she had a contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer and a new name.
Paige was immediately cast opposite Red Skelton in a high-profile dance number in the 1944 Esther Williams musical “Bathing Beauties.” As was common among players contracted by the studio, Paige participated in a series of beauty pageants to generate publicity.
Before long, she signed with Warner Bros. and was cast as a studio guide on the Oscar-nominated hit “Hollywood Canteen.” There she made more than a dozen films, including playing a saloon singer in the 1947 western “Cheyenne” and a suspicious wife in Doris Day's 1948 film debut, “Romance On the High Seas.” .
But Paige thrived in musicals and struggled to find satisfying roles as the genre fell out of favor. The studio abandoned her in 1951.
“One day they asked me to come see Mr. Warner,” she recalled to the New York Post in 2016. “He said, 'Janis, I just wanted to let you know that we're going to let you go when your contract is up. ends in May. We just don't know what to do with you because you are so unconventional. I started to cry.''
But Paige was nothing more than a survivor. Broke and recently divorced, she toured her own nightclub to pay the bills and soon landed on Broadway, where she became a star on her own terms in the well-received mystery comedy “Remains to be Seen” opposite Jackie Cooper in 1951 and “The Pajama Game” in 1954.
When lead roles in the film adaptations of those productions went to other actors, Paige transitioned to television and appeared in her own CBS comedy, “It's Always Jan.” She continued to tour as a singer, performing with Bob Hope's USO shows and giving concerts regularly in Las Vegas, New York and at the former Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
While headlining that hotel's Cocoanut Grove nightclub, Paige was offered a starring role in the 1957 Fred Astaire musical “Silk Stockings.” In that film, Paige was cast as Astaire's producer's fiery leading lady and in one number she found herself literally swinging from a chandelier.
“I wouldn't dare say no to Fred Astaire,” he told the Miami Herald in 2016. “Especially when… you have to grab the chandelier and swing over all those people. He showed it to me and said, 'Do you think you can do that?' And I said, 'Sure, I can do that.' Not knowing if he was going to fall on his face or not. I did not do it”.
Although Paige's starring film roles continued to decline, she starred twice on Broadway in the 1960s, in the musical “Here's Love” and in the original 1968 Broadway production of “Mame.” She also toured productions of “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Sweet Charity” and “Guys and Dolls.”
In the 1970s, Paige ran Ipanema Music Corp., the music publishing company she inherited from her late husband, Oscar-winning composer Ray Gilbert. She also guest-starred on high-profile television shows, playing a waitress who kisses Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Paige co-starred on the daytime soap operas “Capitol,” “General Hospital” and “Santa Barbara.” In 2012, at age 89, Paige performed a one-woman autobiographical cabaret show in West Hollywood, San Francisco and New York.
In a 2017 guest column in the Hollywood Reporter, Paige alleged that department store heir Alfred S. Bloomingdale had sexually assaulted her in 1944. She wrote the column to show support for other women who had come forward with their own stories of sexual harassment in Hollywood. during the early days of the #MeToo movement.
“The relentless barrage of sexual abuse allegations against the super-rich and all-powerful Harvey Weinstein opened up my own memories,” she wrote. “Even at 95 years old I remember everything. Closure is never complete.”
Paige was married three times and divorced twice. Her husband died in 1976. She had no children.
Piccalo is a former Times staff writer.
