Joan Crawford was an American film and television actress who began her career as a dancer and stage showgirl.
Background
Ethnicity:
Joan was of English, French Huguenot, Swedish, and Irish ancestry.
Born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March 23, 1904, in San Antonio, Texas, the youngest and third child of Anna Bell (Johnson) and Thomas E. LeSueur, a laundry laborer. She was of English, French Huguenot, Swedish, and Irish ancestry. Crawford's elder siblings were sister Daisy LeSueur, who died before Lucille's birth, and brother Hal LeSueur.
Crawford's father abandoned the family a few months before her birth, re-appearing later in 1930 in Abilene, Texas, reportedly working as a construction laborer. Following LeSueur's departure from the family home, Crawford's mother married Henry J. Cassin. The marriage is listed in the census as Crawford's mother's first marriage.
Crawford lived with her mother, stepfather, and siblings in Lawton, Oklahoma. There, Cassin, a minor impresario, ran the Ramsey Opera House; he managed to book diverse and noted performers such as Anna Pavlova and Eva Tanguay. At that time, Crawford was reportedly unaware that Cassin, whom she called "daddy", was not her biological father until her brother Hal told her the truth.
While still residing in Lawton, Crawford's stepfather was accused of embezzlement. Although he was acquitted in court, he was blacklisted in Lawton, and the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, around 1916.
Education
Beginning in childhood, Crawford's ambition was to be a dancer. One day, however, in an attempt to escape piano lessons so she could play with friends, she leapt from the front porch of her home and cut her foot severely on a broken milk bottle. As a result, she underwent three surgeries to repair the damage. She was unable to attend elementary school, or continue with dancing lessons, for 18 months.
Following their relocation, Cassin, a Catholic, placed Crawford at St. Agnes Academy in Kansas City. When her mother and stepfather separated, she remained at St. Agnes as a work student, where she spent far more time working, primarily cooking and cleaning, than studying. She later attended Rockingham Academy, also as a working student. While attending there, she began dating, and had her first serious relationship, with a trumpet player named Ray Sterling. Sterling reportedly inspired her to begin challenging herself academically.
In 1922, Joan registered at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, giving her year of birth as 1906. She attended Stephens for only a few months before withdrawing after she realized she was not prepared for college.
Joan joined a traveling dance troupe under her given name of Lucille LeSueur, but returned to Kansas City when the troupe disbanded. She worked as an operator for Bell Telephone Company, and then for various clothiers, before she succumbed once again to the lure of the chorus line. Crawford returned to Kansas City one final time before she embarked on her show business career once and for all.
Crawford left for Chicago where she met the renowned producer J. J. Shubert. He sent her to work in Detroit where she was discovered by talent agents. She took a screen test and signed a contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios in Hollywood. Within the year, Lucille Le Sueur became Joan Crawford. She played minor roles in movies with Jackie Coogan, Lon Chaney, ZaSu Pitts, and others. In 1928, she starred as a flapper in Our Dancing Daughters, the vehicle that brought the name of Joan Crawford to prominence. She emerged from the silent film era in 1929 when she starred in Untamed, her first "talkie" with co-star Robert Montgomery.
Between 1930 and 1935 Joan made 17 movies, including Grand Hotel in 1932, in which she starred with Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, and John and Lionel Barrymore. From 1930 to 1940 Crawford starred in eight pictures with Clark Gable including Dance, Fools, Dance, Laughing Sinners, and Possessed.
In 1940, Crawford starred with Clark Gable in Strange Cargo, and with Fredric March in Susan and God. In 1942, she made Reunion in France with John Wayne. Her life was impacted by World War II. Crawford worked at a service canteen, where she served food to enlisted military personnel and assisted them in writing letters home. She also worked with the American Women's Voluntary Services, in providing day care to women who worked in the war effort.
In 1943, after 18 years with MGM studios, Crawford signed a contract with Warner Brothers. Two years later the war subsided and Crawford's career soared. In 1945, she completed her Oscar-winning performance in the film Mildred Pierce.
It was Mildred Pierce, co-starring Ann Blyth and Eve Arden, that brought Joan Crawford the recognition as a great talent. Crawford went on to make Humoresque with John Garfield and Oscar Levant in 1946, and Possessedin 1947. In 1949, she starred with Zachary Scott in Robert and Sally Wilder's Flamingo Road. Her career extended into the 1950s, with twelve new movies, including Johnny Guitar in 1954 and Autumn Leaves in 1956. She made five more movies during the 1960s, including the classic, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962 with Bette Davis, and Strait-Jacket in 1964, with Diane Baker and Leif Erickson. Crawford's last film, in 1970, was Warner Brother's Trog with Michael Gough and Joe Cornelius.
In addition to Joan's film career, Crawford made 13 television appearances during the last 25 years of her life. These included three appearances on GE Theater and one on Zane Grey Theater between 1954 and 1959. In 1961, she made a second appearance on Zane Grey Theater, and in 1968 she starred with comedienne Lucille Ball on the Lucy Show. In October 1969, Crawford substituted in four episodes of Secret Storm, in place of her eldest daughter, who was a regular member of that cast but who was ill. With the help of Jane Kesner Ardmore, Crawford penned an autobiography in 1962, A Portrait of Joan. In 1971 she wrote a memoir called My Way of Life. She died of a heart attack at her home in New York on May 18, 1977.
Joan Crawford was an American film and television actress counted amongst the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema. One of the topmost actresses of the 1930s, she is best remembered for her films ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ and ‘Mildred Pierce,’ for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was especially popular among the women as she often portrayed hard-working middle-class women onscreen which resonated with her female audience who were struggling in the Depression era. Crawford was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award by John Wayne at the Golden Globes in 1970.
Joan Crawford's handprints and footprints are immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1752 Vine Street for her contributions to the motion picture industry. Playboy listed Crawford as #84 of the "100 Sexiest Women of the 20th century". Crawford was also voted the tenth greatest female star of the classic American cinema by the American Film Institute.
Joan was raised as a Catholic. Later she became a Christian Scientist and, according to some sources, stopped drinking. It was due to her faith that she refused aggressive treatment for the cancer which eventually led to her death, on May 10, 1977, at age 69, 71, 72, or 73. She didn’t have a great fortune to leave, but her twins were provided for, as were a number of charities. Fatefully, Christina and Christopher were not.
Politics
When it came to personal politics, Crawford aligned herself as a Democrat who greatly supported, and admired, the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was once noted as saying: "The Democratic party is one that I've always observed. I have struggled greatly in life from the day I was born, and I am honored to be a part of something that focuses on working-class citizens and molds them into a proud specimen. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Kennedy have done so much in that regard for the two generations they've won over during their career course."
Membership
During World War II, she was a member of American Women's Voluntary Services.
Personality
Crawford was the living and movie example of how a woman from very lowly, if not shady, places could triumph in that version of the American class svstem known as Hollvwood royalty. Crawford sought to be an egalitarian heroine, standing up for herself among nobs, snobs, foreigners, and allegedly classy, educated actresses. That same Joan Crawford sought class, respectability, respect, and her terrific struggle to get there is one of the great career stories in pictures. Maybe the effort unhinged her; surely she behaved badly; and clearly' her work deteriorated. But her Hollywood lost confidence long before she did, and she had to become strident and exaggerated. In the best Crawford films, she has the eye of aspiration and of a sweet hope that clothes, makeup, and position will mask all compromises made on the way: she was as Texan as Lyndon Johnson, as insecure and as close to caricature.
Physical Characteristics:
She seems so big on screen, right? Well the eyes and mouth were certainly large and vivid, but the woman herself was barely 5’ 3". As for the complexion and hair color, the freckles were obliterated with makeup and the hair changed with the role. In addition, Crawford was rarely seen in color until 1953’s Torch Song, and by that time her appearance had reached a height of artificiality that rendered the question of natural hair color moot.
Quotes from others about the person
Scott Fitzgerald captured its monolithic fierceness: "She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face. . . . Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a he,' because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benediet Arnold selling West Point to the British.”
Connections
On June 3, 1929, Crawford eloped to New York with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., son of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and stepson to Mary Pickford. Despite a concerted effort by Crawford, she never earned the acceptance of her in-laws. The rejection devastated Crawford and contributed in part to her divorce from Fairbanks Jr. Before and after the divorce.
Her relationship with Gable eventually overflowed beyond the movie set and erupted into a love affair that climaxed just prior to her divorce from Fairbanks in 1933.
After her breakup with Gable, Crawford embarked on what was perhaps her most brazen and scandalous love tryst. An affair with Franchot Tone, led to their marriage on October 11, 1935 in New Jersey. Initially, Crawford's involvement with Tone was fueled by a love triangle with screen legend, Bette Davis. Both Crawford and Davis each fancied herself as the sole object of Tone's affections, yet it was Crawford who emerged victorious and married Franchot Tone. The marriage lasted four years. During that time Crawford suffered two miscarriages and repeated beatings by her husband. The couple divorced in 1939, after Crawford discovered Tone in his dressing room with a young starlet, under compromising circumstances. After her divorce from Franchot Tone, Crawford adopted a ten-dayold infant and named the girl Christina Crawford.
On July 21, 1942 Crawford married her third husband, Phil Terry. The couple adopted a boy whom they named Phillip Jr., but who was ultimately called Christopher.
In the midst of mounting success in her career, she obtained her third divorce. Crawford testified during the divorce proceedings that Phil Terry was over-bearing and inhibited her status as a movie star.
In 1947, after her divorce from Phil Terry, Joan Crawford adopted two baby girls, born one month apart. She called them her twins, although they were not related in any way. Crawford remained single until May 10, 1955, when she eloped with Pepsi-Cola executive, Alfred Steele. The couple lived an extremely lavish lifestyle in New York, where they spent an estimated $400,000, mostly in borrowed money, to renovate a townhouse. When Steele died unexpectedly of a heart attack on April 19, 1959, Crawford was left to pay the bills and to raise her four children. After Steele's death, Crawford inherited his spot on the Pepsi-Cola board of directors. She remained in that capacity, as the first woman ever to serve on that board, and went on to sign a publicity contract as a spokesperson for Pepsi-Cola.
Father:
Thomas L. LeSueur
(1868–1938)
Mother:
Anna Bell Johnson
(Anna Bell Johnson)
stepfather:
Henry J. Cassin
Spouse (1):
ouglas Elton Fairbanks
(December 9, 1909 – May 7, 2000)
He was an American actor and a decorated naval officer of World War II.
Spouse (2):
Franchot Tone
(February 27, 1905 – September 18, 1968)
He was an American stage, film, and television actor. He is perhaps best known for his Oscar nominated role as Midshipman Roger Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), starring alongside Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.
Spouse (3):
Phillip Terry
(March 7, 1909 – February 23, 1993)
He was an American actor.
Spouse (4):
Alfred Nu Steele
(April 24, 1900 – April 19, 1959)
He was an American soft drink businessman.
Daughter:
Christina Crawford
(born June 11, 1939)
She is an American writer and actress, best known as the author of Mommie Dearest, an autobiographical account of child abuse by her adoptive mother, actress Joan Crawford.
Son:
Christopher Crawford
(b. 1943 - 2006, Eastern Long Island Hospital, Greenport, New York, United States)
Daughter:
Cindy Crawford
(January 13, 1947 - 2007)
Brother:
Hal LeSueur
(September 3, 1903 – May 3, 1963)
He was an American actor.
Sister:
Daisy LeSueur
(b.1902)
Partner:
Clark Gable
(February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960)
He was an American film actor and military officer, often referred to as "The King of Hollywood" or just simply as "The King".
