Silent screen siren Anita Page dies at 98

Page died in her sleep early Saturday morning at her home in Los Angeles, said actor Randal Malone, her longtime friend and companion.

Page's career, which spanned 84 years, began in 1924 when she started as an extra.

Her big break came in 1928 when she won a major role--as the doomed bad girl--in "Our Dancing Daughters," a film that featured a wild Charleston by Crawford and propelled them both to stardom. It spawned two sequels, "Our Modern Maidens" and "Our Blushing Brides." Page and Crawford were in all three films.

Page's daughter Linda Sterne 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 called Page "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."