JANIS PAIGE
(16 September 1922 - 2 June 2024)
The American actress-singer Janis Paige, who has died aged 101, had a very long career and a good and profitable life until she lost her voice in 2001. She had begun singing from the age of five, appearing in local Washington amateur theatre and eventually sang in the wartime Hollywood Canteen shows for service men and women. She had an attractive personality and shone in anything she was given to do. She was a popular actress on Broadway, in films and on television too where she had her own show. Paige was a really accomplished star. Happily, her voice did eventually return after she gave up speaking for three months.
She was born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington, to Hazel and George Tjaden in a family of Norwegian, German and English descent. Donna Mae, her sister Betty Jane and their mother moved to Los Angeles where Donna graduated from high school. After singing at the Hollywood Canteen, she was offered a contract with Warner Bros which saw the start of her film career under the name of Janis Paige. Her first film was actually MGM’s Bathing Beauty (1944) with Red Skelton and Esther Williams. Back at Warners, Janis was in Hollywood Canteen with Eddie Cantor, The Andrews Sisters, Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Roy Rogers and Trigger and all the other stars on Warners’ roster.
Subsequently Paige appeared in the film noir Her Kind of Man with Dane Clark, Edmund Goulding’s remake of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Raoul Walsh’s Western Cheyenne and Winter Meeting with Bette Davis. In 1948 she was in Romance on the High Seas, Doris Day’s film debut. In 1951, after appearing in Two Gals and a Guy, Paige then headed for Broadway. Afterwards, she returned to Hollywood for Silk Stockings, Rouben Mamoulian’s musical version of the Garbo film Ninotchka. It starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Paige did a delightful number with Astaire called ‘Stereophonic Sound’, a send-up of all the trappings that modern films had to undergo. Other films included Please Don’t Eat the Daisies with Doris Day and David Niven, Bachelor in Paradise with Bob Hope and Lana Turner, Follow the Boys with Connie Francis, and Burt Kennedy’s Western Welcome to Hard Times with Henry Fonda. Her last film was Natural Causes in 1994.
On Broadway, Paige appeared in the comedy-drama Remains to Be Seen and then she starred in the musical The Pajama Game as Babe, but when it came to filming it, the role went to Doris Day. Paige returned to theatre on and off during her career, in tours of Annie Get Your Gun, Sweet Charity, Applause, Ballroom, Gypsy and Guys and Dolls. On TV she had her own show in the mid-sixties called It’s Always Jan.
In 1947 Janis Paige married the restaurateur Frank Martinelli Jr, but they divorced in 1951. In 1956 she married the writer Arthur Stander who created her TV show, and they divorced a year later. In 1962 she married the composer and music publisher Ray Gilbert, lyricist of the Oscar-winning song ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’. They stayed together until his death in 1976 but never had any children.
MICHAEL DARVELL