Anita Page

LOS ANGELES—Anita Page, an MGM actress who appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford and Buster Keaton during the transition from silents to talkies, has died. She was 98.

Page died Saturday in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles, said actor Randal Malone, her longtime friend and companion.

Page’s career, which spanned 84 years, began in 1924 when she started as an extra. Her big break came in 1928 when she won a major role—as the doomed bad girl—in “Our Dancing Daughters,” a film that featured a wild Charleston by Crawford and propelled them both to stardom. It spawned two sequels, “Our Modern Maidens” and “Our Blushing Brides.” Page and Crawford were in all three.

In 1928, the New York-born Page starred opposite Chaney in “While the City Sleeps.”

The following year, she was co-star of “The Broadway Melody,” the 1929 backstage tale of two sisters who love the same man. The film made history as the first talkie to win the best-picture Oscar and was arguably the first true film musical.



Abdel-Halim Abu Ghazala

CAIRO—Abdel-Halim Abu Ghazala, Egypt’s former defense minister and a veteran of Arab-Israeli wars who was once touted as a possible successor to President Hosni Mubarak, has died. He was 78.

Egypt’s Middle East News Agency reported that the former field marshal died Saturday at a Cairo military hospital of complications related to throat cancer.

Abu Ghazala served as Egypt’s military attache in Washington in the late 1970s and developed close ties with the U.S. military after Cairo signed a peace treaty with Israel.

Abu Ghazala became minister of defense in 1981, shortly before the assassination of President Anwar Sadat during a military parade. Like Mubarak, Abu Ghazala was sitting next to Sadat when he was assassinated.

As defense minister, Abu Ghazala worked with Mubarak to hold together the 1979 peace treaty with Israel which Sadat signed with former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the face of popular opposition.

For the next eight years, Abu Ghazala was considered the most influential figure in Egypt after Mubarak because of the vast power the Egyptian military wielded in the country’s political and economic life at the time.