Actors - Joan Crawford

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	Actors - Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford (March 23, 1905 – May 10, 1977) was an acclaimed Academy Award winning American actress.

Starting as a dancer, she was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in the mid-1920s and played in small parts. By the end of the '20s, as her popularity grew, she became famous as a youthful flapper.

At the beginning of the 1930s, her fame rivaled that of fellow MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, neither of whom liked her particularly. She was often cast in movies in which she played hardworking young women who eventually found romance and success. These "rags to riches" stories were well-received by Depression era audiences; women, particularly, seemed to identify with her struggles.

By the end of the decade she remained one of Hollywood, Los Angeles, California's most prominent movie stars, and one of the highest paid women in the United States.

Moving to Warner Bros. in 1943, Crawford won an Academy Award for her performance in Mildred Pierce
, and achieved some of the best reviews of her career in the following years.

In 1955, she became involved with PepsiCo, the company run by her last husband. She was elected to fill his vacancy on the Board of Directors after his death in 1959, but was forcibly retired, with a severance package, in 1973.

She continued acting regularly into the 1960s, when her performances became fewer, and retired from the screen in 1970. By the mid-1970s, she became a recluse due to illness.

Early life

She was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, the third child of Thomas E. LeSueur (1868-1938) and Anna Bell Johnson (1884-1958). Her older siblings were Daisy LeSueur, who died as a very young child, and Hal LeSueur.

Her father, who was born in Tennessee, was of France|French Huguenot extraction, and her mother was of Irish and Scandinavian descent. Tom LeSueur's ancestors immigrated from London, England, in the early 1700s to Virginia, where they lived for several generations.

LeSueur was said to have abandoned the family in Texas; Crawford later said she had been only a few months old when her father left.

Her mother later married Henry J. Cassin (1867-after 1919). The family lived in Lawton, Oklahoma, where Cassin ran a movie theater. The 1910 Comanche County, Oklahoma, Census|Federal Census, enumerated on April 20, shows Henry and Anna living at 910 "D" Street in Lawton. Lucille was then 5 years of age.

For most of her life, Crawford maintained that she was born in 1908. It has been generally accepted, however, that she was born earlier. As birth records for San Antonio are not available for years earlier than 1908, and in the absence of a birth certificate, her year of birth has been estimated to be 1905 based on the April 1910 census when she was 5.

Lucille preferred the nickname "Billie", and she loved watching vaudeville acts perform on the stage of her stepfather's theater. Her ambition was to be a dancer.

Unfortunately, she cut her foot deeply on a broken milk bottle when she leapt from the front porch of her home in an attempt to escape piano lessons and run and play with friends. A neighbor, Don Blanding, who became a poet, carried her into the house and phoned the doctor.

She was unable to attend elementary school for a year and a half and eventually had three operations on her foot. Demonstrating the steely determination that would serve her for the rest of her life, she overcame the injury and returned not only to walking normally, but to dancing as well.

Around 1916, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Henry Cassin was first listed in the City Directory in 1917, living at 403 East Ninth Street.

While still in elementary school, she was placed in St. Agnes Academy, a Roman Catholic girls' school in Kansas City. Later, after her mother and stepfather broke up, she stayed on at St. Agnes as a very hardworking student with little time to study. She then went to Rockingham Academy as a work student.

In 1922, she registered at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and gave her year of birth as 1906. She attended Stephens for less than a year, however, as she recognized that she was not academically prepared for college.

Career

Her career spanned over four decades, with numerous highs and lows. She passed through a variety of stages in movies: dewy ingenue, high-spirited flapper, determined working girl, sophisticated leading lady, heroine of noir-inflected melodramas, and finally a scream-queen in a number of horror movies.

Early career

She began as a dancer in a chorus line under the name Lucille LeSueur, eventually making her way to New York. In 1924, aged 19, she signed a contract with MGM, and arrived in Culver City, California, in January, 1925.

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Actors - Joan Crawford

Early life

Career

Early career

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