Obituary: Anita Page

Sep 9 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

SHE was the last voice of the silent age, when the fingers of pianists danced to the action and the strings in the orchestra pit spoke of sorrow and love, and her beauty stirred the juices of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, who sent her doting love letters.

“Ooh, he had it bad,” she recalled later, as though proposals of marriage from one of the great tyrants of the 20th century were routine.

After all, she was then receiving some 35,000 fan letters each week.

In those days of Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, flappers and gaudy buildings, the world seemed mad and Anita Page spent some time in the San Simeon mansion of the newspaper tycoon, Randolph Hearst, model for Xanadu in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.

In fact, she was only briefly a silent star, before successfully graduating into talkies.

Anita Pomares was born into a prominent family in Flushing, New York, and she became a mannequin after completing finishing school.

Family connections gained her a part in The Kiss for Cinderella (1925) being made by Paramount on Long Island.

But Hollywood was where it was happening and she arrived there in 1928 to be befriended by Joan Crawford. This resulted in her being signed by MGM and a starring part in Telling the World. A string of hit silent films followed, during which she overtook Miss Crawford to become second only to Greta Garbo in the ratings.

Tensions mounted with Miss Crawford with the introduction of sound in 1929, but these did nothing to diminish Miss Page’s triumph in the Oscar-winning Broadway Melody, the first blockbuster musical, which broke all box-office records and featured some of the greatest song of the age, including Singin’ in the Rain.

If the fixation Mussolini had for her was harmless, the same could not be said of that held by Irving Thalberg, the producer, who promised her three starring roles if she slept with him.

Soon after refusing to do that, Miss Page found herself appearing in comparatively minor roles, before disappearing altogether.

Her second marriage to Hersechel House, a US Navy Pilot, was happy and she only returned to the movies after his death in 1991 with Sunset After Dark (1996) and then Frankenstein Rising, which is still be to be released. She had two daughters.

Anita Page, actress; born August 24, 1910, died September 6, 2008.