BIO

Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, in 1904.   Her father, a laundry worker, left the family when she was an infant.   Her mother later re-married and the family moved to Lawton, Oklahoma, where her step-father ran a music hall.   Around 1916, shortly after her father was accused of embezzlement, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri and by the time she was a teenager, her step-father and mother had split-up.

Crawford began work as a chorus line dancer, eventually making her way to New York City.   At the age of 20, she signed a contract with MGM and made her film debut in 1925.   By the end of that year, she was a silent film star.

Crawford made an effortless transition to sound in the 1930s and went on to appear in the ensemble classic Grand Hotel (1932) with Greta Garbo.   By the mid-1930s, she was MGM’s most popular box-office star.   However, within a few years, after several flops, Crawford’s MGM contract was terminated in 1943.

She was picked up by Warner Bros. and starred in Mildred Pierce (1945), winning the Academy Award for Actress.   She was nominated again for an Actress Oscar for her role in 1947’s Possessed.   These films gave her career a renewed impetus and she became Warner Bros. top star, supplanting Bette Davis, into the 1950s.

Crawford received her last Academy Award nomination for Actress for her role in Sudden Fear (1952).   Although her star had diminished yet again by the late 1950s, she gave a forceful performance in the classic thriller What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962) with Bette Davis.   Crawford’s last film appearance was in 1971.

She married four times:

1. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., (1929-1933), divorced.
2. Franchot Tone, actor, (1935-1939), divorced.
3. Phillip Terry, actor, 1942-1946, one adopted child, divorced.
4. Alfred Steele, president of Pepsi-Cola, 1956-1959, widowed.

Crawford adopted five children, although she did have to give one back after the real mother had a change of heart.   Three were adopted between marriages.

Crawford died of a heart attack in New York City in 1977.   She had been ill with pancreatic cancer and was 73 years old.

Shortly after her death, the eldest of her four children, Christina Crawford, published a bestseller exposé entitled Mommie Dearest containing allegations that Crawford was emotionally and physically abusive to her and her younger brother Christopher. Though many of Crawford's friends, as well as her other daughters, harshly criticized and disputed the book's claims, other friends did not and her reputation was severely tarnished.   The book was later made into a movie, also entitled Mommie Dearest (1981), starring Faye Dunaway.

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