Janis Paige, who has died aged 101, shone in movies and quite a few tv exhibits, however her biggest triumph got here within the Richard Adler/Jerry Ross Tony award-winning Broadway musical The Pajama Recreation in 1954.
Paige created the function of “Babe” Williams, the spirited chief of the union grievance committee on the Sleep Tite pajama manufacturing unit, vigorously belting out the numbers I’m Not at All in Love, Small Speak and There As soon as Was a Man. This resulted in additional stage leads for Paige as strong-willed girls, to which her singing voice and vibrant persona had been completely suited. She changed Angela Lansbury on Broadway in Mame in 1968, and toured in exhibits together with Gypsy, Applause, Annie Get Your Gun and Guys and Dolls.
It’s possible that her fame would have widened much more had she reprised the function of Babe within the 1957 movie model of the Pajama Recreation. Initially, Warner Bros wished to switch your complete stage firm to the display, with the proviso that one of many two leads needed to be a well known film star.
Sadly for Paige, the studio provided her function to Doris Day when Frank Sinatra turned down the male lead, which was taken by the comparatively unknown John Raitt.
Paige’s movie profession as much as then had been as a contractee at Warner Bros, who solid her primarily because the heroine’s greatest good friend or because the flirtatious “different lady”, typically linked with the humorous character actor Jack Carson.
Among the many movies for the duo had been Romance on the Excessive Seas (1948), Day’s debut characteristic, through which Paige performed Elvira Kent, and some lighthearted musical comedies teaming Carson and the tenor Dennis Morgan (Warners’ reply to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby), specifically Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946), The Time, The Place and the Woman (1946) and One Sunday Afternoon (1948). In a change of tone had been two westerns, Cheyenne (1947), starring Morgan and Jane Wyman, through which Paige was a saloon woman, and The Youthful Brothers (1949), because the nasty ring chief of a gang of outlaws.
Nevertheless, she was dissatisfied with the standard of her roles and the photographs, and this prompted her to depart Warner Bros, seven years after the studio had given her a begin in films with a walk-on half in Hollywood Canteen (1944).
Paige was born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington state. Her mother and father, George and Hazel, separated when she was 4, a yr earlier than she began singing in public in native newbie exhibits. After graduating from highschool, Donna and her mom moved to Los Angeles, the place she was quickly noticed by a Warner Bros expertise scout and given a contract, adopting Janis Paige as her stage title. Amongst her first elements was the harmless Sally Athelny, contrasted with the worldly waitress Mildred Rogers (Eleanor Parker) in Of Human Bondage (1946), the second movie model of the Somerset Maugham novel. Nevertheless, Paige’s preliminary display persona was quickly to vary.
As compensation for shedding out to Day on The Pajama Recreation film, Paige was third-billed (underneath Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse) in Rouben Mamoulian’s movie model of the Cole Porter hit Broadway musical Silk Stockings, launched in 1957.
In it, Paige, as a seductive Hollywood movie star, genially takes off Esther Williams, MGM’s swimming sensation, periodically hitting the aspect of her head as if to get water out of her ears. Paige delivers three self-mocking show-stopping numbers, in certainly one of which, Stereophonic Sound, she dances with Astaire. The opposite numbers are Josephine, a track from a putative vulgar musical primarily based on Tolstoy’s Battle and Peace, and Satin and Silk, which eulogises the significance of the suitable underwear.
After Silk Stockings, Paige made uncommon visits to the large display. The few exceptions had been Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), through which she wittily portrayed a Broadway star who makes a play for an acerbic theatre critic (David Niven), a lot to the chagrin of his spouse (Day); and The Caretakers (1963), set in a psychiatric hospital run by an over-the-top Joan Crawford.
By then, Paige’s lengthy tv profession was effectively underneath manner. She had her personal sitcom, It’s All the time Jan (1955-56), and have become a really acquainted face for an additional six many years, showing in nearly any sequence one cares to call.
In 2017, inspired by the #MeToo motion, Paige determined to talk out about an assault by Alfred Bloomingdale, the inheritor to the division retailer fortune. “It was on the very starting of my movie profession. I used to be 22 and nonetheless a virgin. Even at 95, I keep in mind all the pieces. Closure is rarely full … I merely wish to add my title and say ‘Me, too.’”
She was married thrice and divorced twice. Her third husband, the lyricist Ray Gilbert, died in 1976.
Janis Paige (Donna Mae Tjaden), actor and singer, born 16 September 1922; died 2 June 2024
