Janis Paige, an exuberant nightclub performer who starred on Broadway in “The Pajama Game,” swung from a chandelier with Fred Astaire in the movie “Silk Stockings” and played a flirtatious waitress who tempts Archie Bunker to stray from his marriage vows on the sitcom “All in the Family,” died June 2 at her home in West Hollywood. She was 101.
Her death was confirmed by her friend Stuart Lampert, who said she had been in hospice but did not cite a specific cause.
Although Ms. Paige appeared in westerns and melodramas, she was best known as a scene-stealing comic actress in parts that often brandished her mile-long legs and flashing eyes. Film critic Alton Cook of the New York World-Telegram and Sun described her as “one of the most deft and engaging of our girl clowns.”
Talent scouts spotted her singing opera at the Hollywood Canteen, a club that catered to servicemen on leave during World War II. Within a year, she was under contract to Warner Bros. studios and cast in the film “Hollywood Canteen” (1944) as a hostess and aspiring actress who bewitches a wolfish soldier (Dane Clark). When he asks for a date, she fends him off with dramatic flourish: “I give so much of myself to my art, and there’d be so little left for you.”
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She also played a gangster’s moll and chanteuse in the melodrama “Her Kind of Man” (1946) and had decorative roles in “Winter Meeting” (1948), starring Bette Davis, and “Wallflower” (1948) as the glamorous sister of studious Joyce Reynolds.
There were plenty of musical comedies in the mix, often with co-stars Jack Carson or Dennis Morgan. In the western “Cheyenne” (1947), she played a dancehall chanteuse who performs atop a bar.
Her other films included “Two Guys from Milwaukee,” “The Time, the Place and the Girl” (both 1946) and “Romance on the High Seas” (1948). The last marked the movie debut of Doris Day, whose studio career waxed as Ms. Paige’s rapidly waned.
To rejuvenate her prospects, Ms. Paige assembled a touring nightclub act that played in Las Vegas, New York and points in between. She made her Broadway debut in 1951, portraying a comely but hopelessly bad singer in the Howard Lindsay-Russel Crouse mystery-comedy “Remains to Be Seen.”
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Ms. Paige became a major Broadway star playing the union grievance committee leader in “The Pajama Game” (1954), a musical romance set amid labor-management tensions at a pajama factory. The show, which ran two years, won the Tony Award for best musical, provided an early showcase for the modern dance choreography of Bob Fosse, and featured a bevy of hit songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.
Ms. Paige was turned down for the 1957 film version, which featured her Broadway co-star, John Raitt, opposite Day. “For the movie, they needed a box office name,” she told the Associated Press years later. “They wanted Frank Sinatra to play John Raitt's role. Frank considered it and turned it down. I would have played my role.”
“I never get devastated about things like that,” she added. “I’m lucky to have had the show. I always felt that way. There’s nothing like the original.”
The musical’s success — and her headline act at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles — made Ms. Paige a household name. She had a starring role on “It’s Always Jan” (1955), a short-lived CBS sitcom about a widowed cabaret star raising a young daughter. She also won a supporting role as a flamboyant Hollywood actress opposite Astaire and Cyd Charisse in “Silk Stockings” (1957).
The film was based on a 1955 Broadway musical adaptation of the 1939 movie “Ninotchka,” a romantic comedy starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. Ms. Paige provided the movie with some much-needed juice — especially her droll rendition of Cole Porter’s “Stereophonic Sound,” choreographed by Hermes Pan and culminating in Ms. Paige and Astaire gliding across the room, suspended from a chandelier.
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“It was hard work, believe me,” she later told the Miami Herald, describing weeks of rehearsals. “I was one mass of bruises. I didn’t know how to fall … because I was never a classic dancer.”
She added that she was too intimidated by Astaire to refuse his idea for the chandelier sequence. “He 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.”
She returned to Broadway in 1963 for “Here’s Love,” Meredith Willson’s musical adaptation of the 1947 Christmas film “Miracle on 34th Street.” In the role Maureen O’Hara originated on screen, Ms. Paige played a cynical working mother whose young daughter clings to an abiding faith in Santa Claus.
In 1968, Ms. Paige took over from Angela Lansbury in Jerry Herman’s long-running Broadway musical comedy “Mame,” playing a bohemian socialite caring for her orphaned nephew. “She looks glowingly well and sings, dances and acts with a sweet enthusiasm, but not perhaps the bittersweet enthusiasm Miss Lansbury presented,” New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes wrote. “She is less of a character but, as some compensation, perhaps more of a performer.”
In the movie comedy “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960), Ms. Paige had a vivid supporting role as an actress who slaps theater critic David Niven for giving her a bad review. She was part of Bob Hope’s USO shows and was a television stalwart, with appearances on variety shows, afternoon soap operas such as “General Hospital” and series including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Trapper John, M.D.” and “St. Elsewhere.”
Most memorable was a guest role on “All in the Family,” as a diner waitress with hungry eyes for Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker. Archie was a comically lovable bigot who, whatever his many faults, seemed devoted to his bighearted wife, Edith. Feeling neglected because of his wife’s volunteer work, he is susceptible to Ms. Paige’s unsubtle invitation to her home.
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Ms. Paige told the Herald that she received mounds of angry letters for almost wrecking the Bunkers’ TV marriage. “My God, they hated me,” she said. “I had hate mail: ‘How dare you come between Archie and Edith? How dare you do this?’ And other people would write, ‘It’s about time he kissed somebody else, and I would have kissed you, too, if I had been there.’ ”
Donna Mae Tjaden was born in Tacoma, Wash., on Sept. 16, 1922. She was 4 when her parents separated and was raised by her mother and grandparents. Her mother encouraged her show business ambitions, which took her to Hollywood within a year of completing high school.
Her marriages to restaurateur Frank Martinelli Jr. and TV producer Arthur Stander ended in divorce. She was married to Ray Gilbert, the Oscar-winning lyricist of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from 1962 until his death in 1976. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
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For years, Ms. Paige ran a music publishing company that Gilbert formed with the bossa nova composer-performer Antonio Carlos Jobim. Despite struggling with vocal cord damage, she continued an active cabaret career into her 90s with a one-woman autobiographical show that blended songs with spicy patter about aging.
In a forceful coda to her career, amid a national debate about how powerful men treat young women, she wrote an essay in the Hollywood Reporter in 2017 about sexual assault in Hollywood. She said that, as a starlet who was “still a virgin, untouched and blind to the predators waiting,” she was pressured by a director to go on a date with his friend, the department store scion Alfred Bloomingdale, who attempted to rape her that night.
“The fear for my job, the fear that no one would believe me and the shame I felt at the betrayal of myself kept me quiet all these years,” she wrote. Referring to the social media hashtag #MeToo that conveys solidarity with victims of sexual assault and harassment, she added: “At 95, time is not on my side, and neither is silence. I simply want to add my name and say, ‘Me too.’ ”
