Joy Page

Hollywood is run on nepotism. It is known. And how much that bothers me depends on whether we’re talking about Chet Hanks or Anjelica Huston, you know? There are absolutely people whose careers in the industry got started because they’re related to someone but who deserve the career they had. Acting dynasties exist for a reason, and that’s even without getting into behind-the-scenes dynasties that I’ve discovered while working on these columns. So it’s a little surprising to discover that, while Joy Page was indeed Jack Warner’s stepdaughter, he didn’t want her to be an actress because he thought having an actor in the family degraded it.

In fact, Page was the daughter of minor actor and later assistant director and production designer Don Alvarado, born José Ray Paige, and socialite Ann Boyar, also known as Ann Page and eventually Ann Warner. Boyar was, it seems, a member of Marlene Dietrich’s “sewing circle,” or anyway that’s the gossip, but she ended up divorcing Page’s father for Jack Warner. Page was twelve at the time. She was at some point taking acting lessons, and her coach encouraged her to try out for a minor role in an upcoming Warners picture, which Page hadn’t been initially interested in because she thought it was corny—but Ingrid Bergman was starring in the movie, so how bad could it be?

Page would, in her only Warners film, play the small but iconic role of Annina Brandel. Annina, like so many others, is desperate to get out of Casablanca, but her husband keeps losing their money at roulette. Without his knowledge, she sleeps with Captain Renault—it’s never spoken, of course, but if you’ve seen the movie you know—to ensure their safe passage. It’s one of those roles that’s astonishing under the Code, and it’s a performance that’s astonishing given Page was seventeen years old at the time.

She didn’t have a great career. She was sixth-billed in Kismet, with her mother’s friend Marlene Dietrich. She did some TV, including playing Madame Dreyfus in the Lux Video Theatre production of “The Life of Emile Zola.” Her last movie role was, sigh, redface, as Prairie Flower in the Disney feature Tonka. She married actor William T. Orr, who did get a job basically operating the television branch of Warners through nepotism, and retired some years later, possibly out of frustration with the roles she was getting.

Given what Warner thought on the subject of having an actress in the family, maybe he sabotaged her career. I don’t know. It’s interesting that a couple of her last roles were for Disney—she also appeared on the iffy Wonderful World of Disney series The Swamp Fox. I don’t remember her character, but that’s okay. Maybe, if she hadn’t retired, she would’ve settled into the same “I guess I work for Walt now” life that a lot of other actors did in that era. I’m sure her stepfather would’ve been thrilled.