The triple threat who dazzled on stage and screen
Janis Paige could do it all, in any medium. With more than 100 stage, TV, and film credits to her name, she could belt a song to the rafters, as in the original 1954 Broadway production of The Pajama Game, and crack wise with Bob Hope, in USO shows in Korea and Vietnam. She could also dance — even pairing up with Fred Astaire in "Stereophonic Sound," a particularly gymnastic number from 1957's film Silk Stockings that had the two leaping atop furniture and ultimately swinging from a chandelier. Astaire asked if she was up to it. "I said, 'Sure,'" she recalled in 2016, "not knowing if I was going to fall on my face or not. I didn't!"Â
Born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Wash., Paige "was a gifted singer as a child," said the Los Angeles Times, performing in amateur shows by age 5, but she thought she'd go into opera. That all changed when she filled in for an absent singer at Los Angeles' Hollywood Canteen nightclub the night a film studio head's assistant was in attendance. She spent the 1940s "as one of the busiest actors in Jack Warner's stable," starring in more than a dozen movies. When her contract wasn't renewed she "became a star on her own terms" on Broadway. In The Pajama Game, "her greatest triumph," she earned raves as strong-willed union leader Babe Williams, said The Guardian. She missed out on the 1957 film version — the role went to her rival Doris Day. But she made a hilarious impression that year in Silk Stockings in a role spoofing swimming starlet Esther Williams, which she played by "periodically hitting the side of her head as if to get water out of her ears."Â
By the 1970s, Paige had become "a television stalwart," said The Washington Post, taking recurring roles on All in the Family and General Hospital. She also maintained "an active cabaret career into her 90s." In 2017, in a rare moment of public vulnerability, she joined the ranks of the #MeToo movement, telling how, at 22, she was pressured by a director to go out with department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale, who tried to rape her. She fought back, bit the hand that was trying to muzzle her screams, and ran away. "Even at 95, I remember everything," she wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. But "time is not on my side, and neither is silence." |