After high school, she moved to Los Angeles, where she became a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II, as well as posing as a pin-up model.

This led to a film contract with Warner Bros., although she later left the studio to pursue live theatre work, appearing in a number of Broadway shows.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, she also made numerous television appearances, as well as starring in her own sitcom It's Always Jan. Paige was born Donna Mae Tjaden in Tacoma, Washington, the elder child of Hazel Leah (née Simmons) and George S. Tjaden on September 16, 1922,[1][2] primarily of Norwegian, German, English, and Cornish descent.

She moved, with her mother and sister, to Los Angeles after graduating from high school, and she was hired as a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during World War II.

[3] Courtesy of MGM, she helped entertain the troops in February 1944 at Camp Roberts, California, starring in Rio Rita along with Ann Ayars.

For the screen version, the studio wanted one major movie star to guarantee the film's success, so John Raitt's role of Sid was offered to Frank Sinatra, who would have been paired with Paige.

When Sinatra declined, the producers offered Paige's role of Babe to Doris Day, who accepted and was paired with Raitt.

[7] After six years away, Paige returned to Hollywood in Silk Stockings (1957), which starred Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse,[5] the Doris Day/David Niven comedy Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960),[3] and as a love-starved married neighbor in Bachelor in Paradise (1961) with Bob Hope.

[10] The tryout tour gave Paige her first experience of the eastern summer-stock circuit, where she said audiences "laughed so hard you just had to wait",[11] and she enjoyed the role so much, she played it again in 1988 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, this time with Robert Reed.

[13] Paige made her live dramatic TV debut June 27, 1957, in "The Latch Key" on Lux Video Theatre.

; Columbo; Night Court; and Caroline in the City; and in the 1975 television movie John O'Hara's Gibbsville (also known as The Turning Point of Jim Malloy).

She also appeared on a season 11 episode of Happy Days, as a roadside diner waitress named Angela who may or may not be Fonzie's long lost mother; Fonzie has a heartfelt talk with Angela, and it is left up to the viewer to determine if she is his mother or not – though the emotions exhibited by her character throughout the scene indicate that she is, but does not want to be found out.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she was seen on several soap operas, including Capitol (1987, as Sam Clegg's first wife, Laureen), General Hospital (1989–1990, as Katharine Delafield's flashy Aunt Iona, a lady counterfeiter), and Santa Barbara (1990–1993, replacing Dame Judith Anderson as matriarch Minx Lockridge).

[20] In 2017, at age 95, Paige wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter in which she stated that Alfred Bloomingdale had attempted to rape her when she was 22 years old.