Crawford, Joan 1904-1977

CRAWFORD, JOAN 1904-1977

Actress

An Adaptable Star

One of the leading ladies of Depression Hollywood, Crawford was known for her ability to play just about any role, inhabiting romantic comedies (W. S. Van Dyke's Forsaking All Others [1934]; Edward H. Griffith and George Cukor's No More Ladies [1935]), gangster films (Harry Beaumont's Dance Fools Dance [1931]), historical dramas (Clarence Brown's The Gorgeous Hussy [1936]), farces (Van Dyke's Love on the Run [1936]), vicious social comedies (Cukor's hit The Women), Depression melodramas (Brown's Possessed [1931]; Howard Hawks's Today We Live [1933]), romantic dramas (Beaumont's Laughing Sinners [1931]; Brown's Chained [1934]), and even ice-skating pictures (Ice Follies of 1939, directed by Reinhold Schunzel). She costarred with Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in Edmund Goulding's 1932 Grand Hotel, played opposite Norma Shearer and Rosalind Russell in The Women, and had on-screen romances with Clark Gable and with Franchot Tone, to whom she was also married. In short Joan Crawford was the consummate professional, an all-purpose Depression star. Although her vehicles varied, Crawford tended to play independent women whose choices (or lack thereof) forced them to grapple with issues of survival in the modern world, working girls from the tough part of town clawing their way to the top.

Coming up the Hard Way

Joan Crawford's early beginnings prepared her for a life of hard work. She worked as a laundress, shop clerk, and waitress before winning her first glimmerings of attention in a local Charleston dance contest. Stints as a chorus girl in Detroit and on Broadway gave her the exposure she needed to be spotted by an M-G-M talent agent. Her name by this point had changed from being Lucille Fay Le Seur (her birth name and her waitress name) to Billie Cassin (her stepfather's name and her chorus girl name) to her studio-chosen name, Joan Crawford. Although Crawford was by no means the incarnation of Hollywood glamour or beauty, nor even a great actress, she was above all adaptable, moving from a 1920s flapper image in The Taxi Dancer (1926, directed by Harry Millard) to that of an ambitious working girl in the 1930s. Crawford changed hairstyles and colors with a dizzying rapidity as she moved up through the Hollywood ranks, becoming a top star by the late 1920s. She seemed to acquire and shed star husbands at the same fast pace. Her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. lasted from 1929 to 1933 and was followed by nuptials with Franchot Tone (1935-1939). While her marriage to Philip Terry (1942-1946) also ended in divorce, her final marriage in 1956, to Pepsi-Cola board chairman Alfred Steele, left her a widow in 1959. Her acting career continued in the early war years with such pictures as A Woman's Face (1941), directed by Cukor, but her popularity began to decline as she grew older. No matter how changeable she might seem from role to role, she refused to move from the glamour roles to more-maternal assignments. M-G-M's attempt to cast her in screwball comedies was largely unsuccessful as well. After 1937 she was no longer on the list of top moneymaking stars, and in 1944 she was written off by M-G-M.

The Comeback Kid

A survivor in life as on the screen, however, Crawford triumphed in her first Warner Bros. picture, the steamy 1945 domestic melodrama/noir Mildred Pierce, based on the James Cain novel and directed by Michael Curtiz. Not only did the picture score several million dollars at the box office, it also resulted in a Best Actress Oscar for Crawford—her first in a twenty-year career as a star. She was nominated for two more Oscars in the course of her career—the first time for Possessed (1947) and the second time for Sudden Fear (1952). Not only did Crawford succeed in the 1950s, in a string of star vehicles that ran the gamut from Western (Johnny Guitar [1934]) to melodrama (Queen Bee [1935]), but she had another surprise comeback in 1962, when Robert Aldrich directed her and Bette Davis in the chilling Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She capitalized on her success in a string of other horror movies throughout the 1960s, including Strait-Jacket (1964, directed by William Castle) and I Saw What You Did (1965, directed by Castle). Although Crawford wrote two volumes of memoirs, A Portrait of Joan (1962) and My Way of Life (1971), they have faded from the public eye. The Crawford portrait which survives, however, is her adopted daughter Christina Crawford's Mommie Dearest, published in 1978, the year after Joan Crawford's death. The book is notable for the horrific picture it paints of its subject, in Christina's version a parent crazed and vicious enough to be the real-life version of the psychopathic characters Crawford played so well on screen. Mommie Dearest was made into a 1981 movie, which flopped, starring Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and directed by Frank Perry.

Sources:

Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939, volume 5 of History of the American Cinema, edited by Charles Harpole (New York: Scribners, 1993);

Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, revised edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994);

Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System (New York: Pantheon, 1988).