Trivia

When the hit musical "The Pajama Game" was being transferred to film, co-stars Janis and John Raitt were told either might recreate their respective roles, but not both. The reason given was that neither were established movie stars at the time. Frank Sinatra was approached to do the film, which meant Janis would have co-starred, but he turned it down. Doris Day was offered the role and accepted, so Raitt was taken on board and Paige was out.

On April 1, 1968, she replaced Angela Lansbury as "Mame Dennis" in "Mame" on Broadway. She played the role for nearly two years, and garnered rave reviews.

During her Broadway run of "The Pajama Game" in the mid-'50s, she accidentally developed poison oak. Co-star John Raitt had been clearing land and came to the theater with a rash on his hands. Janis missed three weeks of performances and had to endure potassium baths which made her turn purple.

Chose her first name in honor of Elsie Janis, beloved entertainer of troops during World War I; Paige was her maternal grandmother's name.

Got her start working as a singer at the Hollywood Canteen, where she was discovered by a Warner Brothers talent scout. One of her first film roles was co-starring in the Warner Brothers film, Hollywood Canteen (1944), where she plays a Warner Brothers messenger girl working at the canteen.

In honor of her 100th birthday on September 16, 2022, her name was cited first and foremost in nationwide Born on This Day Mention Columns.

She has developed a new autobiographical cabaret show in 2010 that she has been performing to great acclaim in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Alternate board member of the Songwriters Guild of America.

She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6624 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960.

Was only 12 years older than Nicolas Coster when she played his mother, Minx Lockridge (1990-1993), on Santa Barbara (1984).

Stepmother of Joanne Gilbert.

In 2017, Paige wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter in which she stated that Alfred Bloomingdale had attempted to rape her when she was 22 years old. She alleges that she was sexually assaulted after being lured into Bloomingdale's apartment under false pretenses.

In the summer of 1946, she was hired as the star attraction for an engagement at New York's famous Copacabana night club, and a little-known comedy duo was hired to open for her. Unfortunately for her, the duo - Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis - were an amazing runaway success, and literally became stars overnight as a result of their first appearance (which went on for more than twice as long as it was supposed to, because of audience acclaim). According to theatrical lore, the contracts were re-drawn the very next day so that Martin and Lewis were now the headliners and she was the opening act.

Paige was a Republican who supported the campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower during the 1952 presidential election.

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 to go to the voice clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center 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." She finally was introduced by a doctor to another voice teacher, Bruce Eckstut, who helped her regain her speaking voice and singing voice.

After high school, she moved to Los Angeles, where she became a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II, as well as posing as a pin-up model.

She began singing in local amateur competitions at the age of five.

In 1984 she was back on Broadway in a non-musical play, Alone Together. 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", and she enjoyed the role so much, she played it again in 1988 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, with Robert Reed.

In 1963 Janis Paige returned to Broadway in a successful run of Here's Love, and in 1968 she took over the title role in the long-running hit musical Mame. She later appeared on national tours and in summer stock playing Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, Margo Channing in Applause, Mama Rose in Gypsy and Adelaide in Guys and Dolls.

In April 1947, she was crowned "Miss Damsite" and participated at the ground-breaking ceremony for the McNary Dam, on the Columbia River, alongside Cornelia Morton McNary, Senator Charles McNary's widow, and Oregon Governor Earl Snell.

A rare dramatic role was as Marion, an institutionalized prostitute, in The Caretakers (1963).

Paige appeared on Broadway, and she was a huge hit in a 1951 comedy-mystery play Remains to Be Seen.

She also toured successfully as a cabaret singer.

She was on the December 1954 cover of Esquire, where she was featured in a seductive pose taken by American photographer Maxwell Frederic Coplan.

She passed away at age 101, from natural causes. Coincidentally, her final film appearance was in a film titled Natural Causes (1994), 30 years earlier.