In memoriam: Janis Paige (Telegraph 10/06/24)

Janis Paige, who has died aged 101, was an actress and singer styled under the Hollywood studio system who flourished in the 1950s on Broadway and television. For some while, her fate was linked with that of the more celebrated Doris Day. Paige was the female lead in Romance on the High Seas (1948), the Warners musical-comedy in which Day made her film debut, and the two women would vie for roles – with mutual affection – over the subsequent decade.

Paige had won raves as the spitfire union rep Katherine “Babe” Williams in The Pyjama Game, the big Broadway hit of 1954. Yet when the show came to be filmed by Warner Bros. three years later, the balance of power had shifted. After studio execs insisted the film needed an established name to sell it, Paige found herself bumped in favour of the newly stellar Day. “I wasn’t jealous of anybody,” Paige later said of her movie career. “I just felt like the luckiest kid in the world to be there.”

Much like Day’s, Paige’s career was one of perpetual reinvention. She was born Donna Mae Tjaden on September 16, 1922 in Tacoma, Washington, eldest of two daughters to George S. Tjaden and his wife Hazel Leah (née Simmons). A singer from the age of five, she moved to L.A. with her mother and sister after high school to study opera and was hired to perform at the Hollywood Canteen during WW2.

A striking, open-faced beauty, she was spotted by representatives of the MGM studio, who launched the renamed starlet – Janis after WW1 sweetheart Elsie Janis and Paige after her maternal grandmother – in the Esther Williams musical Bathing Beauty (1944). Only upon transferring to Warner Bros. did she win comparatively substantial roles: “They were far more diverse with me. I went from Hollywood Canteen (1944) to Of Human Bondage (1946), for God’s sake.”

She later returned to MGM to sing and dance alongside Fred Astaire in the self-reflexive “Stereophonic Sound” number of Silk Stockings (1957), which climaxed with Paige literally swinging from a chandelier: “[Fred] showed me and said, ‘You think you can do that?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I can do that.’ Not knowing if I was going to fall on my face or not. I didn’t.”

With that obstacle negotiated, she crossed paths with Day once more on Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960); now Day enjoyed top billing, while Paige settled for third behind David Niven. By then, her cinematic prospects were dwindling, eclipsed by her powerhouse work elsewhere.

The Pyjama Game earned Paige both a headline slot at the glitzy Cocoanut Grove nightclub and her own, Desilu-produced sitcom It’s Always Jan (1955-56), wherein Paige played a plucky chanteuse. On TV, she excelled in guest roles: as the waitress tempting the uxorious Archie Bunker on All in the Family (1976), as the ambiguous woman who may or may not have been the Fonz’s estranged mother on Happy Days (1981), and as the flasher trying to perk up male patients on St. Elsewhere (1983). 

Her final screen role was on the legal procedural Family Law in 2001, the year Paige was diagnosed with career-threatening vocal cord damage: “There were bits of skin hanging off my vocal cords. They told me to go home and not talk for three months.” Yet she recovered and was still performing as late as 2010 in a one-woman cabaret show. She wrote a memoir, Reading Between the Lines, in 2020.

She married three times: to the restauranteur Frank Martinelli Jr., to It’s Always Jan producer Arthur Stander and, most enduringly, to the songwriter Ray Gilbert, a coupling that lasted thirteen years until the latter’s death in 1976. In 2017, with #MeToo trending, Paige wrote a Hollywood Reporter column in which she recalled being assaulted in her twenties by the department store tycoon Alfred Bloomingdale: “Even at 95, I remember everything… Time is not on my side, and neither is silence.”

Janis Paige, born September 16, 1922, died June 2, 2024.