Janis Paige, star of Hollywood and Broadway, dies at 101

Janis Paige, Hollywood and Broadway star who danced with Fred Astaire, dies at 101, leaving a lasting legacy.

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 90s, has died. She was 101.

Paige died Sunday of natural causes at her Los Angeles home, longtime friend Stuart Lampert said Monday.

Paige starred on Broadway with Jackie Cooper in the mystery-comedy, Remains to be Seen, and appeared with John Raitt in the smash hit musical The Pajama Game. Her other films included a Hope comedy, Bachelor in Paradise; the Doris Day comedy Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and Follow the Boys.

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, who died in 1982. “I could feel his hands, not only on my breasts but seemingly everywhere. He was big and strong, and I began to fight, kick, bite and scream,” she wrote. “At 95, time is not on my side, and neither is silence. I simply want to add my name and say, ‘Me too.’”

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, The Time, the Place and the Girl, Love and Learn, Always Together, Wallflower and Romance on the High Seas, which marked Doris Day’s film debut. Meanwhile, she had changed her name from Donna May Tjaden, adopting her grandfather’s name of Paige. She took her first name from Elsie Janis, famed for entertaining troops in World War I.

Paige’s contract expired in 1949, at a time when studios were unloading talent because of the inroads of television. “That was a jolt,” she remarked in 1963. “It meant I was washed up at 25.” She took her talents to Broadway, where she starred in “Remains to Be Seen” (her role would be snatched by June Allyson for the screen adaptation), and starred as Babe opposite Raitt as Sid in the original production of “The Pajama Game,” directed in 1954 by George Abbott. (Doris Day would take her role in the film version.)