Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford was an American actress born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, with her birth year placed between 1904 and 1908. She came from French-Huguenot, English, Dutch, and Irish ancestry, the youngest of two children of construction worker Thomas E. LeSueur and Anna Bell Johnson, later known as Anna Cassin. Her father abandoned the family when she was still an infant, and her childhood was marked by moves, financial strain, and work. Under the nickname “Billie,” she grew up close to the stage through her stepfather Henry J. Cassin, who ran the Ramsey Opera House in Lawton, Oklahoma.

From childhood, Crawford wanted to be a dancer. That ambition was interrupted when she badly cut her foot on a broken milk bottle while trying to escape piano lessons, leading to three surgeries and 18 months away from school and dance lessons. After the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, she attended St. Agnes Academy and later Rockingham Academy as a work student, spending more time cooking and cleaning than studying. She briefly attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, but withdrew after deciding she was not ready for college. Her schooling never went beyond the primary level, a fact tied to the instability of her early life.

Crawford began performing as Lucille LeSueur, dancing in the choruses of traveling revues. Producer Jacob J. Shubert saw her in Detroit and put her in the chorus line of Innocent Eyes at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in 1924. Soon after, a screen test helped bring her to Hollywood, where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her to a motion-picture contract in 1925. Her first film credit was in Lady of the Night, where she served as a body double for Norma Shearer. Small roles followed in films such as The Circle, Pretty Ladies, The Only Thing, and The Merry Widow.

At MGM, she was first frustrated by the size and quality of her roles, but she turned that frustration into self-promotion. The studio changed her name through a “Name the Star” contest in Movie Weekly, settling on Joan Crawford, a name she said she disliked because it sounded like “crawfish,” though she also said she liked the security that came with it. By the end of the 1920s, she had built the image of a nationally known flapper. In the 1930s, her fame rivaled that of MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. She often played hardworking young women who found romance and financial success, roles that appealed strongly to Depression-era audiences, especially women.

Crawford became one of Hollywood’s most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but by the end of the 1930s her films were losing money and she was labeled “box office poison.” After nearly two years away from the screen, she returned with Mildred Pierce in 1945 and won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She continued acting in film and television through the 1960s, though less often as the decade went on, and retired from the screen after the horror film Trog in 1970. She was also connected to the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to its president, Alfred Steele, and after his death in 1959 she was elected to fill his seat on the board of directors, where she remained until being forced to retire in 1973.

Crawford married four times, with her first three marriages ending in divorce and her last ending with Steele’s death. She adopted five children, one of whom was reclaimed by his birth mother. Her relationships with her two older children, Christina and Christopher, were acrimonious; she disinherited them, and after Crawford’s death Christina published the memoir Mommie Dearest. Crawford withdrew from public life in her later years and became increasingly reclusive before her death on May 10, 1977. For readers of a quotes site, her life gives weight to any words attached to her: the dancer who fought for screen space, survived public reversals, and remade herself more than once.