HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS JANIS PAIGE BORN ON 1922 SEPTEMBER 16

HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS JANIS PAIGE

 BORN ON 1922 SEPTEMBER 16

Early life and career[edit]

Born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington, she began singing in public at age five in local amateur shows. She moved to Los Angeles after graduating from high school and was hired as a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II.

The Hollywood Canteen was a studio-sponsored club for members of the military. A Warner Bros. agent saw her potential and signed her to a contract. She began co-starring in low budget musicals, often paired with Dennis Morgan or Jack Carson. She co-starred in Romance on the High Seas (1948),

the film in which Doris Day made her movie debut. Paige later co-starred in adventures and dramas, in which she felt out of place. Following her role in Two Gals and a Guy (1951), she decided to leave Hollywood.















Paige appeared on Broadway and was a huge hit in a 1951 comedy-mystery play, Remains to Be Seen, co-starring Jackie Cooper. She also toured successfully as a cabaret singer. In April 1947 

Paige was crowned "Miss Damsite" and participated at the ground-breaking ceremony for the McNary Dam, on the Columbia River, alongside Cornelia Morton McNary, the Senator's widow, and Oregon's governor, Earl Snell.[1]

Stardom came in 1954 with her role as "Babe" in the Broadway musical The Pajama Game. She was given the December 1954 cover of Esquire magazine, where she was featured in a seductive pose taken by American photographer, Maxwell Frederic Coplan. For the screen version, the studio wanted one major movie star to guarantee the film's success, so Raitt's role of Sid was offered to Frank Sinatra who would have been paired with Paige. When Sinatra turned it down the producers offered Paige's role of Babe to Doris Day, who accepted and so Day was paired with Raitt.[2] After six years away, Paige returned to Hollywood in Silk Stockings (1957), which starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, the Doris Day comedy Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960), and as a love-starved married neighbor in Bachelor in Paradise (1961) with Bob Hope.

.

Musical theatre[edit]

Paige returned to Broadway in 1963 in the short-lived Here's Love. In 1968, when after nearly two years Angela Lansbury left the Broadway production of the musical Mame to take the show on a limited US tour, Paige was the star chosen to be the first Broadway replacement,[3] and she admired the character, saying, "She's a free soul. She can be down, but never out. She's unbigoted. She says what she thinks with a kind of marvelous honesty, which is the only way to say anything.

" [4] She also appeared in touring productions of musicals such as Annie Get Your Gun, Applause, Sweet Charity, Ballroom, Gypsy: A Musical Fable, and Guys and Dolls. In 1984 she was back on Broadway with Kevin McCarthy in a non-musical play, Alone Together[5] The tryout tour gave Paige her first experience of the Eastern Summer Stock circuit, where she said audiences "laughed so hard you just had to wait,"[6] and she enjoyed the role so much she played it again in 1988 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, this time with Robert Reed.[7

Personal life[edit]

Paige has been married three times.

 She married Frank Louis Martinelli Jr, restaurateur, in 1947 and divorced him in 1951.

[11] She married Arthur Stander, television writer and creator of It's Always Jan, in 1956 and divorced him in 1957.[

Add caption

10][12] Paige married Ray Gilbert, composer and music publisher in 1962. Gilbert died March 3, 1976.[10] He wrote the classic song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah".

Add caption

In 2001, Paige found that her voice was cracking with nearly irreparable vocal-cord damage. She went to a singing teacher a friend recommended. Paige's voice ended up worse with her not being able to talk at all. "He literally took my voice away," she said. "I lost all my top voice. I couldn't hold a pitch for a second. Finally, I couldn't make a sound. He said that this will all come back. It didn't." Another singing teacher told her she go to the voice clinic at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "There were bits of skin hanging off my vocal cords," she said. "They told me to go home and not talk for three months." Paige finally was introduced by a doctor to another voice teacher, Bruce Eckstut. He helped her regain her voice and singing voice.[13]

Paige has no children.