Anita Page, the last surviving star of the silent movies, has died at the age of 98 in Los Angeles.

Page’s career spanned 84 years – and her lasting fame endured despite a 60-year career break forced upon the actress at the height of her fame after she refused to sleep with a studio boss.

She had started out as an extra in 1924 and broke into the big time with a powerful performance in the 1928 silent melodramaOur Dancing Daughters, alongside Joan Crawford.

The combination of Page, who played to perfection the manipulative, amoral fortune-hunter trying to snare a husband, with the noble and virtuous Crawford was such a success that the two were paired up again in 1929 in the silent Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, a talkie, in 1930.

But Page’s fraught relationship with her co-star caused palpable tension at MGM. She said that she ended up “loathing Joan”, whom she accused of trying to attack her physically.

Her last starring role was in the thriller Sunset after Dark in 1994 – but she had just completed a cameo role in the horror movie Frankenstein Rising, which is due for release later this year.

She said of her famed performance in The Broadway Melody, the screen’s first musical, which won Best Picture at the 1929 Academy Awards: “I took MGM into the sound era and made them a huge buck.” In 1928 she co-starred with Lon Chaney in While the City Sleeps, her first MGM film having been the 1927 hit Telling the World.

Born Anita Pomares in New York State in 1910, Anita Page had a complex and dangerous love life, with suitors ranging from Clark Gable and the MGM studio boss Irving Thalberg to Benito Mussolini.

Gable called her “a unique beauty” and revealed that when, years later, he starred with Grace Kelly he could not get Page out of his mind.

It was claimed that Mussolini wanted to marry her even though they never met. The Italian Fascist dictator sent her many love letters and gifts; fearing a scandal, the studio ordered her not to respond.

However, it appeared that her mother carried on the correspondence on her behalf, sending signed pictures in return.

The overtures from Mussolini and her refusal to sleep with Thalberg eventually led to her contract with MGM being terminated. She believed she was blacklisted by the other studios and retired at the height of her fame aged only 23. She married Nacio Herb Brown, the songwriter, in 1933.

The marriage was a failure, and five years later she married Herschel House, a US Navy pilot who died in 1991. The couple had two daughters.

She was something of a real-life Norma Desmond – the faded star played by Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard – but unlike Desmond made a successful comeback to acting, aged 84, after her six-decade break.

Page died in her sleep at home on Saturday morning.

Page’s daughter, Linda Sterne, said that her mother had been good friends with Jean Harlow, and during the 1930s had lived as a guest in a California castle owned by the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, – himself immortalised in Citizen Kane.

“She was the best mother I could have,” she said. “She was wonderful.”

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