Janis Paige, a popular actor in Hollywood and in Broadway musicals and comedies who danced with Fred Astaire, toured with Bob Hope, and continued to perform into her 80s, has died. She was 101. Paige died Sunday of natural causes at her Los Angeles home, the AP reports. Paige starred on Broadway with Jackie Cooper in the mystery-comedy, Remains to be Seen, and with John Raitt in the smash hit musical The Pajama Game. Other films included a Hope comedy, Bachelor in Paradise, and the Doris Day comedy Please Don't Eat the Daisies. In 2018, she added her voice to the #MeToo movement, alleging an assault when she was 22 by the late department-store heir Alfred Bloomingdale.
Paige's big break came in wartime when she sang an operatic aria for servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen. MGM hired her a day later for a brief role in Bathing Beauty—she spoke two lines in the film, which starred Esther Williams and Red Skelton—then dropped her. The same day, Warner Bros. signed her and cast her in a dramatic segment of the all-star movie Hollywood Canteen. Her contract started at $150 a week. "I earned more per week than my mother had made in a month during the Great Depression," she recalled in the Hollywood Reporter in 2018. Her salary rose to $1,000 weekly as the studio kept her busy in lightweight films such as Two Guys from Milwaukee and Romance on the High Seas, which marked Doris Day's film debut.
Paige's contract expired in 1949, per the AP, at a time when studios were unloading talent because of the inroads of television. "That was a jolt," she remarked later. "It meant I was washed up at 25." She took her talents to Broadway, where she starred in Remains to Be Seen and as Babe opposite Raitt in the original production of The Pajama Game. MGM producer Arthur Freed caught her nightclub act and offered her a part opposite Astaire in Silk Stockings. In it, she and Astaire spoofed the newfangled movie gimmicks in the Cole Porter number "Stereophonic Sound," including swinging from a chandelier. "I was one mass of bruises. I didn't know how to fall," she said.
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After leaving Warner Bros., she turned to TV, appearing in shows including Santa Barbara, Eight Is Enough, and Fantasy Island. On All in the Family, she played a waitress who becomes involved with Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker. Paige replaced Angela Lansbury in the New York production of Mame and toured in Gypsy and Annie Get Your Gun. She also supplied glamor for Hope's Christmas visits to Cuba, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. She sang in clubs with Sammy Davis Jr. and Perry Como. In May 2003, Paige resumed entertaining after a long absence. In a show in San Francisco, Paige told stories about Astaire and Frank Sinatra and sang tunes from her films and stage musicals.
- Paige's essay accusing Bloomingdale, in which she wrote, "Even at 95, I remember everything," can be found here.
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