Joan Crawford’s career as a movie star can be divided into four clearly delineated stages. She first achieved stardom as a big-eyed dancer/flapper, a daring daughter of the Jazz Age, a self-described “girl drunk on her youth and vitality.”
Evolving into a leading lady with a glamorous mask of a face, Crawford then settled in as one of MGM’s leading romantic heroines, providing competition to the likes of Garbo and Norma Shearer during the 1930s.
Switching studios in her 40s, Crawford emerged as a somewhat hardened, slightly masculinized “career woman” and took over Bette Davis’s status as Warner Bros.’ top female star of juicy melodramas.
Along with Davis, the aging Crawford later kept her career going in a genre that was derisively labeled “hag horror” or Psycho-biddy movies in the 1960s. Showing the ravages of the years but still providing an iconic presence, Crawford performed in sometimes-ludicrous roles with her same typical drive and professionalism.
Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1904 (some sources say 1906). Coming from a poverty-stricken background, she worked from an early age as a waitress, shopgirl and, eventually, as a dancer in nightclubs and on the Broadway stage.
She made her film debut in a silent short in 1923 and by 1925 had been signed by MGM, where many of her early roles were uncredited bits. She gradually earned more important parts and, after some 25 roles, had her breakthrough in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). She successfully transitioned to talkies in 1929.
Four of the films in our Birthday Tribute are from Crawford’s leading-lady period at MGM. Dancing Lady (1933) was the fifth of eight films in which she starred opposite Clark Gable, with whom she reportedly shared an offscreen romance. Mannequin (1937), a drama about a marital mix-up, marked Crawford’s only onscreen pairing with Spencer Tracy.
A Woman’s Face (1941), a remake of a 1938 Swedish film starring Ingrid Bergman, is considered by many to contain one of Crawford’s best performances. Sensitively directed by George Cukor, the drama concerns a blackmailer whose life changes after her scarred face is remade by a plastic surgeon.
The comedy-drama Susan and God (1940), again under Cukor’s knowing direction, offered Crawford a change of pace as a ditsy woman who impulsively embraces religion, to the annoyance of those around her. Fredric March costars as her drunken husband.
After being labeled “box-office poison” and considered washed-up at MGM in the late 1930s, Crawford enjoyed one of the great movie comebacks with a new contract at Warner Bros. She delivered a compelling performance in her first star vehicle at the studio, the film noir/soap opera Mildred Pierce (1945), an unqualified success that brought her a Best Actress Oscar.
She was nominated again for another well-made romantic noir, Possessed (1947), in which she plays a woman struggling with mental illness. Van Heflin is the man over whom she obsesses.
Crawford and Bette Davis started the Grand Guignol tradition among aging film actresses with the riveting horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). They played sisters who were former stars and antagonists, with Davis as the vicious tormentor and Crawford as the invalid victim. Davis’s bravura acting was Oscar-nominated but, to the surprise of some, Crawford’s intense, relatively understated performance was not.
Whatever the status of her career or the nature of her vehicles, there is no doubt that Crawford had an ongoing love affair with the camera. According to George Cukor, “The nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became. The camera saw, I suspect, a side of her that no flesh-and-blood lover ever saw.”
By Roger Fristoe
