Joy Page: Actress in 'Casablanca'

Joy Page was one of the last two surviving members of the cast of what is arguably the most beloved of Hollywood movies, Casablanca. Her role, as a young Bulgarian bride hoping to flee to America with her husband if they can procure the necessary exit visas, was a small one, but a strand which revealed telling traits in the attitudes and relationship of café-owner Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Prefect of Police, Captain Renault (Claude Rains).

Since Page was the stepdaughter of studio chief Jack L. Warner, it was often assumed that nepotism had played a part in her casting, but in fact Warner was not enthusiastic about her acting ambitions, and she was one of the players personally chosen by director Michael Curtiz after she auditioned for him. Only 17 years old and just out of high school, she had been taking acting lessons from Sophie Rosenstein, the studio's drama coach.

Her key scene came when, having been promised the all-important visas if she will sleep with Renault, she seeks the advice of Rick. "If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?" Bogart tells her brusquely, "Go back to Bulgaria", but then arranges that her husband (Helmut Dantine) wins enough at roulette to pay for the visas. "As I suspected," Renault tells Rick when he finds out, "you're a rank sentimentalist . . . I forgive you this time. But I'll be in tomorrow night with a breathtaking blonde, and it will make me very happy if she loses."

Born Joy Ann Paige in Los Angeles in 1924, she was the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her father was the silent-screen star Don Alvarado (real name Jose Paige), who specialised in playing Latin lovers. Her parents divorced when she was five years old, and her mother, the former Ann Boyar, married Warner.

Despite the success of Casablanca, Warner refused to sign Page to a contract and she made no more films for the studio. She moved to MGM to play Marsinah, daughter of a wily beggar (Ronald Colman) in the exotic drama Kismet (1944), and in 1945 she married a handsome young actor William T. Orr, who was a contract player at Warners and had played supporting roles in such films as Honeymoon for Three and Navy Blues (both 1942). Warner swiftly made him a producer, and later Orr was to become the first head of Warner Brothers Television. He and Page had three children, but divorced in 1970.

Page made only a handful of films, notably Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948) starring Sabu, and Budd Boetticher's The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), in which she played a Mexican beauty. In The Shrike (1955), notable as the film in which the director-actor José Ferrer decided to confound the fans of June Allyson by casting her against type as a shrewish wife, Page was the "other woman" with whom Ferrer falls in love. Her last film was Tonka (1958), starring Sal Mineo as an Indian brave who tames a horse that is the only survivor of Custer's Last Stand. She retired from acting in 1959, after appearing in the Disney TV series The Swamp Fox.

When Aljean Harmetz wrote her book on the making of Casablanca, Round Up the Usual Suspects (1992), she disovered that Page had become a recluse who found talking about the film "painful". "When she was younger," said her son, "she was very torn by success. She was raised very strongly Catholic, and success was unseemly, not a proper thing to achieve". Wrote Harmetz, "All that is left of his mother's career is a scrapbook. The tattered clippings show a career that began in a blaze with Casablanca and her second movie, Kismet. Two-thirds of the book is empty . . . All that she can remember of her two months on Casablanca is how 'sweet' and protective Humphrey Bogart was."

Tom Vallance

Joy Ann Paige (Joy Page), actress: born Los Angeles 9 November 1924; married 1945 William T. Orr (one son, one daughter, and one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1970); died Los Angeles 18 April 2008.