Silent Movie Star Anita Page Dies (Photos)

Silent film movie star, Anita Page, has died at the age of 98. Anita Page was an MGM actress that appears in movies with Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford and Buster Keaton during the change from silent movies to talking films. See below for more on Anita Page and pictures.

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Anita Page, silent screen actress, died at 98 in her sleep early Saturday morning at her home in Los Angeles.

Page began her movie career back in 1924, when she began as a movie extra. But Anita Page’s huge break came in 1928 when she landed her role as a bad girl in “Our Dancing Daughters”.

It spawned two sequels, “Our Modern Maidens” and “Our Blushing Brides.” Anita Page and Joan Crawford were in all three films.

Linda Sterne, Anita Page’s daughter said her mother had been good friends with Marion Davies and Jean Harlow, and for about six months in the 1930s lived as a guest in William Hearst’s massive castle on the Southern California coast.

“She was the best mother I could have,” Sterne said. “She was wonderful.”

In 1928, the New York-born Page starred opposite Chaney in “While the City Sleeps.”

The following year, she was co-star of “The Broadway Melody,” the 1929 backstage tale of two sisters who love the same man. The film made history as the first talkie to win the best-picture Oscar and was arguably the first true film musical.

In his 1995 book “A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film,” author Richard Barrios reserved much of his praise for Bessie Love, the veteran actress who played the other sister. But he said Anita Page was “intensely likable — sincere, well-meaning, endearing, in much the same fashion as Ruby Keeler several years later — and, of course, quite beautiful.”

Variety wrote in 1929 that Page “is also apt to bowl the trade over with a contribution that’s natural all the way, plus her percentage on appearance. … She can’t dance, (but) the remainder of her performance is easily sufficient to make this impediment distinctly negligible.”

Among Page’s other films were two of Keaton’s sound films, “Free and Easy” in 1930, and “Sidewalks of New York” in 1931; “Night Court,” with Walter Huston in 1932; and “The Easiest Way” in 1931, in which the handsome Clark Gable had a small role.

Anita Page was married for a short time to composer Nacio Herb Brown, who wrote songs for “The Broadway Melody,” but the marriage was annulled within a year, Sterne said.

Page stopped acting in 1936 when she fell in love with Herschel House, a Navy aviator. The couple married six weeks later and Page happily adapted to life as an officer’s wife, hosting many parties at their home in Coronado, a city peninsula in the San Diego Bay, Sterne said. The couple had two daughters, Linda and Sandra.

After House died in 1991, Page went on to return to films. In 1994, she appeared in the suspense thriller “Sunset After Dark.”

Page’s most recent work was a cameo in the horror film “Frankenstein Rising,” due out later this year.

Our sincerest condolences to Anita Page’s family and friends.

Images: PR

Source: news

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