Joan Crawford Biography

Joan CrawfordJoan Crawford was an Oscar winning actress and one of Hollywood's greatest ever stars.Born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March 23, 1905, Joan Crawford had a tumultuous childhood. Her older sister, Daisy, died when she was very young, and her father abandoned the family. She and her brother, Hal LeSueur who went on to become an actor, were raised by her mother and a succession of her mother's boyfriends, until Anna Bell Johnson married cinema manager Henry J Cassin in Oklahoma. It was there that Crawford, used to being ignored and abused, determined that she was going to turn her life around by becoming a dancer.Shortly afterwards, a foot injury, which required multiple surgery had her laid up for a year and a half, but with the fierce stubbornness that helped her in later life, she overcame the pain and learned not only to walk again but to recover her dancing skills. She used these skills in cheap Midwestern shows, but when her mother and Cassin split up, she found a part in a chorus line in New York City. On New Year's day 1925 she set out for Hollywood, changed her name, and prepared to take the world by storm.The first of over a hundred film roles came in King Vidor's Proud Flesh; it was only a bit part, but Crawford was able to work her way up from here. Within a year she was ranked alongside the likes of Fay Wray and Mary Astor as one of Hollywood's most promising starlets, leading to lead roles in films like Paris, with Charles Ray, The Understanding Heart, with Rockliffe Fellowes, and Spring Fever, with William Haines. She also took time out to appear in cult director Tod Browning's The Unknown, noting that she learned more there from Lon Chaney, than from anyone else in her career.In time, she would find a vocation as a horror film scream queen, but in the meantime she became a massive mainstream success. Her work on the huge hit Possessed was all the more impressive because of the real life chemistry between her and Clark Gable, with whom she had a passionate on-again off-again affair interrupted by the concerns of studio bosses. This led to a role in the classic Grand Hotel, alongside Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, and Wallace Beery. Crawford also found fame in fashion circles when the dress she wore in Clarence Brown's Letty Lynton started a craze. In time, her penchant for glamour would turn her into a gay icon.In the late 1930s, as Crawford's youth faded, so did her career. For a while she struggled to find roles in successful films, but things turned around for her when she appeared in George Cukor's The Women, going up against Norma Shearer with a tough performance that marked the development of a whole new image. Just as film noir blossomed, Crawford was there to take the plum roles - in Mildred Pierce, with Jack Carson and Zachary Scott; The Damned Don't Cry, with David Brian and Steve Cochran; Sudden Fear, with Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame; and Queen Bee, with Barry Sullivan and Betsy Palmer. It was at this stage that she developed her famous rivalry with Bette Davis (enormously beneficial to the careers of both), which was eventually,played out in dramatic form in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?