Anita Page, shown in this promotional 1932 photo, appeared in a cameo role in a film to be released later this year. She was 98. Anita Page, shown in this promotional 1932 photo, appeared in a cameo role in a film to be released later this year. She was 98. (File/Associated Press)

Anita Page, an actress who appeared with the likes of Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney, has died at age 98.

The actress died early Saturday morning in her sleep at her Los Angeles home, revealed actor Randal Malone, her longtime friend and companion, on Sunday.

Page's daughter Linda Sterne said her mother was close friends with stars such as Marion Davies and Jean Harlow.

"She was the best mother I could have," Sterne said. "She was wonderful."

Page's career spanned more than eight decades, starting in 1924 when she appeared as an extra.

Four years later, she played the doomed bad girl in Our Dancing Daughters with Crawford. The film would boost their careers and spawned two sequels: Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides.

Also in 1928, the New York-born Page starred opposite Chaney in While the City Sleeps, and the next year, she co-starred in The Broadway Melody, which marked the first talking picture to win an Oscar for best film and is considered the first true movie musical.

Variety wrote in 1929 that Page "is also apt to bowl the trade over with a contribution that's natural all the way, plus her percentage on appearance.... She can't dance, [but] the remainder of her performance is easily sufficient to make this impediment distinctly negligible."

Gave up acting in 1936

Shortly after, Page appeared in two of Keaton's sound films: Free and Easy (1930) and Sidewalks of New York (1931). She went on to star with Walter Huston in The Easiest Way (1931) and Night Court (1932). Page would also win acclaim for her portrayal of a prostitute in Skyscraper Souls (1932).

She was briefly married to composer Nacio Herb Brown, but the marriage was annulled within a year. Page stopped acting in 1936 when she fell in love with Herschel House, a navy aviator. The couple married six weeks later.

Page found a new role in playing the officer's wife in Coronado, a city peninsula in the San Diego Bay, and had two daughters, Linda and Sandra, with Brown.

After House died in 1991, Page returned to acting, and in 1994, she appeared in the suspense thriller Sunset After Dark.

More recently, she had a cameo in the horror film Frankenstein Rising, due out later this year.

With files from the Associated Press