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| Birth Name(s) : Lucille Fay LeSueur |
Date of Birth: March 23, 1904 |
| Status:
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| Profession:
Actor |
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Full Joan Crawford Biography
Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March 23, 1904 in San Antonio, Texas. She was the product of a broken home before she was born in that her parents were already separated before the birth. Her mother had trouble keeping husbands after having married three times. Joan was fond of dancing and had entered several dance contests. She wanted a career in show business because it was much more glamorous than the odd jobs she was working.
One dance contest she won landed her in a chorus line. Before long, Joan found herself dancing in the big cities of the Mid-West and along the Atlantic coast. After almost two years dancing, Joan decided to take a chance and packed her bags and moved to Los Angeles, California and the movie colony of Hollywood. She felt movies might afford her a chance of fame and glory and she was determined to succeed. Not long after arriving in California, Joan got her first bit role as a showgirl in Pretty Ladies (1925) in 1925. Three other films quickly followed. Although the roles weren't much to speak of, Joan continued to toil away.
Throughout 1927 and the first part of 1928, Joan was handed menial roles. That ended with the role of Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). The film was the one to get her elevated to star status. She had made the tough hurdle of making the "big time". Now she was faced with another. The "talkie" era was upon the movie colony and many stars of the era were suddenly worried about their futures. With silent pictures, it didn't matter what kind of voice you had, but with sound pictures it made a tremendous difference. While some stars saw their livelihood halted, Joan's strong voice enabled her to continue. Her first film with sound was in Untamed (1929). The film was a success and Joan's career was still in top form. As she entered the 1930s, Joan became one of the top stars in the MGM stable. Films such as Grand Hotel (1932), Sadie McKee (1934), No More Ladies (1935), and Love on the Run (1936), kept movie patrons and film executives happy. Joan was in top form.
Joan continued to pick and choose what good roles she wanted to appear in. 1952 saw Joan nominated for a third time for her role of Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (1952). This time the coveted Oscar went to Shirley Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). Her career slowed down tremendously after that. Movie after movie saw her relegated to menial roles, with the possible exception of 1962's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) with her arch-rival, Bette Davis, who she detested. By now the feud, between the two was well-known. No one is sure exactly how it started, but one time Miss Davis said of Joan, "She's slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie." In return Joan said, "I don't hate Bette Davis even though the press wants me to. I resent her. I don't see how she built a career out of a set of mannerisms, instead of real acting ability. Take away the pop eyes, the cigarette, and those funny clipped words and what have you got? She's phony, but I guess the public really likes that".
Her adopted daughter, Christina, wrote a tell-all book that did not put Joan in a flattering light called, "Mommy Dearest". Needless to say Christine was cut out of the will. Her final appearance on the silver screen was a 1970 flop called Trog (1970). Turning to vodka, she was not seen much afterward. On May 10, 1977, Joan died of cancer in New York City. She was 73 years old. |
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Additional Joan Crawford Biography
Crawford's father was said to have abandoned the family in Texas; Crawford later said she had been only a few months old when her father left. Her mother later married Henry J. Cassin. The family lived in Lawton, Oklahoma, where Cassin ran a movie theater. The 1910 Comanche County, Oklahoma, Federal Census, enumerated on April 20, shows Henry and Anna living at 910 "D" Street in Lawton. Lucille was then five years old, thus showing that 1905 was her likely year of birth, although later on, she would shave some years off and claim she was born in 1908.
By the end of the decade, Crawford had adopted a more sophisticated image in which her characters seemed to be defined as much by their glamorous clothing, beautiful accessories, and carefully styled hair and make-up as by any meaningful character trait. Fans soon tired of this remote "clothes horse" persona and eventually her movies began to lose money. In 1938, she was one of the unfortunate stars to be labeled "box-office poison", along with Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Fred Astaire.
Crawford somewhat rectified her position at MGM through a fruitful collaboration with director George Cukor. She first played bitchy home-wrecker Crystal Allen in Cukor's comedy The Women (1939), then capitalized on this success in two more movies under his direction, Susan and God (1940) and A Woman's Face (1941).
Crawford's other movie roles of the era include Lane Bellamy in Flamingo Road (1949), a dual role in the film noir The Damned Don't Cry (1950), her performance in the title role in Harriet Craig (1950) at Columbia Pictures. After filming This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), Crawford asked to be released from her Warner Brothers contract. As she had done so before, Crawford triumphed as Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (1952) at RKO, the movie that introduced her co-star, Jack Palance, to the screen and earned her a third and final Oscar nomination as Best Actress.
In 1973, she retired from the company at the behest of company executive Don Kendall, whom Crawford had referred to for years as "Fang."
In October 1968, her 29-year-old daughter, Christina, who was then acting in New York on the TV soap opera The Secret Storm, fell ill and needed immediate medical attention. Crawford offered to fill in for her and play her daughter's role until she was well enough to return, which the producer readily agreed to. The implausibility of Crawford (then 63) playing a 28-year-old woman was coupled by her apparent state of intoxication on the live telecast. Christina was fired from the role the following year; in her memoir Mommie Dearest, Christina claimed her mother's behaviour contributed to her firing.
In 1929, at the time she wed her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, Crawford purchased a mansion at 426 North Bristol Avenue in Brentwood, midway between Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean, which was her primary home for the next 26 years. Over the years she had her home decorated and redecorated by William Haines, her former silent movie co-star and lifelong friend, who was much in demand as an interior designer after receiving Crawford's recommendation.
She moved to a lavish penthouse apartment at 2 East 70th St. with her last husband, Alfred Steele. He died there on April 19, 1959. She then sold her Brentwood mansion and stayed in New York, moving to a smaller apartment, number 22-G in the Imperial House. She later moved to a smaller apartment in the same building (Apt.# 22-H) where she died, aged 72. She kept a small apartment in Los Angeles for her frequent trips there.
The third child was Christopher Terry (born 1943). She and Philip Terry adopted him that same year, and he remained her son, as Christopher Crawford, after she and Terry divorced. According to Christina, Crawford had changed this second birth date to October 15 because she was afraid he would also be taken away. He died of cancer on September 22, 2006 in Greenport, New York.
Shortly after Crawford's death, the eldest of her four children, Christina, published a bestseller exposé titled Mommie Dearest containing allegations that Crawford was emotionally and physically abusive to her and her brother Christopher. Though many of Crawford's friends, as well as her other two 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 titled Mommie Dearest, starring Faye Dunaway as Crawford.
In September 1973, she moved from apartment 22-G to the smaller apartment 22-H in the Imperial House. Her last public appearance was September 23, 1974, at a party honoring her old friend Rosalind Russell at New York's Rainbow Room. Russell was battling breast cancer at the time and died two years later in 1976. On May 8, 1977, Crawford gave away her beloved Shih Tzu "Princess Lotus Blossom," which signaled to her close friends that the end was near. |
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Joan Crawford Quote(s)
| Nobody can imitate me. You can always see impersonations of Katharine Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. But not me. Because I've always drawn on myself only. |
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