Read The Times review of Anita Page in War Nurse

Anita Page was unusual in several ways, not least because having achieved stardom she then took a 60-year career break. Her name appears in few of the principal Hollywood history books, but for a short while at the end of the silent era and in the early days of the talkies she was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, a rival to Greta Garbo and to Joan Crawford — with whom she appeared in several films and whom she loathed.

Page starred in The Broadway Melody (1929), a convoluted romantic drama in which she and Bessie Love played showbiz sisters. It was the first talkie to win the Best Picture Oscar and, arguably, the first genuine film musical. But her contract at MGM was terminated after she was caught up in a bizarre web of romantic ambitions and sexual jealousies involving the legendary studio boss Irving Thalberg, who wanted to sleep with her (though he was married to actress Norma Shearer at the time), and the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who wanted to marry her (though they never actually met).

So Page disappeared from public view for around 60 years. But in recent years several interviewers tracked her down, keen to tap into her memories as one of the last surviving stars of the silent era. One interviewer reported that she divided her time between homes in Beverly Hills and Pasadena, living the life of Norma Desmond, the faded star in the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard.

She would get up at noon, was dressed by one of her assistants in remodelled gowns from the 1920s, and would then spend the day watching her old films and talking about the way it used to be. Her small entourage included a little band of aspiring actors, happy to reassure her that she was still a star. And she did start making films again, with cameo appearances in obscure low-budget movies, such as Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood (2000) and The Crawling Brain (2002).

Born Anita Pomares in New York state in 1910, she made her film debut in A Kiss for Cinderella (1925) and played a woman trying to trap a rich husband in the silent melodrama Our Dancing Daughters (1928), while Joan Crawford was her virtuous friend. It was a popular combination and MGM teamed the two women again in Our Modern Maidens (1929) and the talkie Our Blushing Brides (1930).

By this time Page was a genuine star, reportedly receiving 10,000 letters a week and employing her mother to help to answer them (and her father as her chauffeur). She co-starred with Lon Chaney in While the City Sleeps and West of Zanzibar (both 1928), with Ramon Novarro in The Flying Fleet (1929) and with Buster Keaton in Free and Easy (1930) and Sidewalks of New York (1931).

She had a fling with Clark Gable, who had a supporting role in The Easiest Way (1931). He was haunted by her memory and later wrote: “She was a unique beauty. When I worked with Grace Kelly and looked into her eyes I remembered Anita Page.”

But it was the overtures from Mussolini and Thalberg that effectively ended her career in Hollywood. Mussolini wrote her dozens of amorous letters, apparently proposing marriage. The letters may now have been lost, but there seems to be little doubt that they did once exist.

Page had little or no interest in politics. She appreciated that Mussolini was a very important man. She also dated a German prince at one point. But she seemingly failed to realise the potential dangers of a romantic link with a Fascist leader. MGM, however, was nervous about the correspondence and the political implications.

There was the further complication of Thalberg’s own advances, which Page rejected. “I’m sure where I feared to tread Joan Crawford, Constance Bennett and maybe even Jean Harlow didn’t give it a second thought,” she said. “Irving was obviously so mad with me he ruined my career.”

She believed she was effectively blacklisted by studio bosses, and she retired from movies in the early 1930s. In 1933 she married the composer Nacio Herb Brown, who wrote songs for The Broadway Melody, but the marriage was annulled within months, supposedly because Brown had neglected to divorce a previous wife. In 1937 she married Herschel House, a US Navy pilot. The couple lived in Coronado in southern California.

Page still has one film awaiting release, Frankenstein Rising, in which she plays Frankenstein’s wife, Elizabeth, as an old woman.

Page’s husband, Herschel House, died in 1991, and she is survived by one of their two daughters.

Anita Page, actress, was born on August 4, 1910. She died on September 6, 2008, aged 98