Stage Career
Page was a trained method actor and worked closely with Lee Strasberg. She began appearing in stock theatre at 17. In 1952, her appearance as Alma Off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke at the downtown Circle in the Square Theatre was legendary. Page's performance (as the minister's daughter consumed with infinite longing) in the 1952 production, directed by José Quintero, gave the play a new life, and, according to common wisdom, it was that production (for its daring, for its fervor, for its being "downtown" rather than in the artistically "safe" realm of Broadway) which gave birth to the Off-Broadway movement in New York theatre. Her work continued on Broadway as the spinster in The Rainmaker, and as the frustrated wife whose husband becomes romantically obsessed with a young Arab, played by James Dean, in The Immoralist.
She earned critical accolades for her performance in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth opposite Paul Newman. She originated the role of a larger-than-life, addicted, sexually voracious Hollywood legend trying to extinguish her fears about her career with a young hustler named Chance Wayne, played by Newman. Page received her first Tony Award nomination for the play, as well as the Sarah Siddons Award for her performance in Chicago. She and Newman later starred in the film adaptation and Page earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the film.
In 1964, she starred in a Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters playing eldest sister Olga to Kim Stanley's Masha with Shelley Winters as the interloper Natasha. Both Shirley Knight and Sandy Dennis played the youngest sister Irina at different stages in this production. It was directed by Lee Strasberg (and a version of it was preserved on film). She also starred in Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy/White Lies, in 1967, which was the production in which both Michael Crawford and Lynn Redgrave made their Broadway debuts. Page received her second Tony nomination (for Best Featured Actress in a Play) for a successful production of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular with Sandy Dennis and Richard Kiley. Page also starred as Zelda Fitzgerald in the last major Broadway production of a Tennessee Williams play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which did not succeed financially on Broadway, in 1980. And, also in New York, she played Mary Todd Lincoln opposite Maya Angelou in a two-character play by Jerome Kilty called Look Away.
Page starred in another successful Broadway play, Agnes of God, which opened in 1982, and ran for 599 performances with Page performing in nearly all of them. She received a Tony Award nomination, for Best Lead Actress in a Play, for her performance as the secretive nun Mother Miriam Ruth.
After winning an Academy Award in 1986, Page returned to Broadway in a revival of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit in the role of the psychic medium Madame Arcati. The production, which also starred Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, was Page's last. Page was again nominated for a Tony Award, for Best Lead Actress in a Play. She did not win, and several days after the awards ceremony, she died. The show lasted several weeks more, with co-star actress Patricia Conolly taking over Page's role.
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