One of the last living links to the silent film era, and one of that period's brightest stars, passed away in her Los Angeles home earlier this week at the age of 98.  In addition to being one of the silent era's most beautiful and popular stars, Anita Page was also one of its most fascinating stories, both for her meteoric rise to the top and her abrupt -- and self-driven -- decision to quit the business.

Born in Flushing in 1910, she left Queens to make it big in pictures when she was still a high school student, landing her first role (as an extra) at age 15.  Her big break came in 1928, when she co-starred with Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters.  Although her character died at the end of the picture, audiences immediately took to her saucy grin, easy blonde good looks, and petite frame, and the movie -- as well as two sequel-cum-remakes, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides (also starring Crawford) -- made her a huge star.  She became one of the biggest stars of the era, daily receiving hundreds of fan letters, including multiple proposals of marriage -- at least according to Page herself -- from Benito Mussolini.

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PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, permit me to bore you with one of my very earliest movie memories. My mom took me to the 1973 animated Disney version of Robin Hood, in which the title character was played, if memory serves, by a small red fox. And when this fox was asked to express his feelings towards Maid Marian, he sang out, "I love her more than life itself!" The line was, I now suspect, not wholly original, but at the time it was new to me, and it stirred me deeply. I think that from that moment on, I have lived my life in hopes of finding someone, or something, I loved more than life itself. So far, the results have been mixed, but I can truly say of Children of Men that I love it more than life itself and that the movie has in turn accepted my love gracefully and never punishing me for it by using it to make me feel stupid, small, or unworthy, which is more than I can say for certain redheads of my acquaintance.

Since there are no bad scenes in the picture, and in fact precious few that could not be pointed to as jaw-dropping evidence of its stature, it is not easy to single out one, but I will settle on the chase scene from around the middle of the movie, with Clive Owen, Claire-Hope Ashitey and Pam Ferris fleeing the farmhouse in a car that won't start, with the goonish "revolutionaries" in hot pursuit.

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