Joan Crawford was an Academy Award-winning American actress, named the tenth Greatest Female Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
Starting as a dancer on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in 1925 and initially played small parts. She became a famous flapper by the end of the '20s. Beginning in the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled fellow MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. She often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags to riches" stories were well-received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. By the end of the decade, Crawford remained one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars, and one of the highest paid women in the U.S.
For her performance in Mildred Pierce Crawford won an Academy Award and in the following years, achieved some of her best reviews. In 1955, she became involved with PepsiCo, the company run by her last husband, Alfred Steele. After his death in 1959, Crawford was elected to fill his vacancy on the board of directors but was forcibly retired in 1973. She continued acting regularly into the 1960s, when her performances became fewer, and after the release of the horror film Trog in 1970, retired from the screen.
Early life
Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, the third child of Tennessee-born Thomas E. LeSueur and Anna Bell Johnson . Her older siblings were Daisy LeSueur, who died very young, and Hal LeSueur. Although Crawford was of mostly English descent, her surname originated from her great-great-great-great grandparents, David LeSueur and Elizabeth Chastain, French Huguenots who immigrated from London in the early 1700s to Virginia.
Crawford later said when she was a few months old her father abandoned the family. Her mother later married Henry J. Cassin. The family lived where Cassin ran a movie theater in Lawton, Oklahoma. The 1910 Comanche County, Oklahoma, Federal Census, enumerated on April 20, showed Henry and Anna living at 910 "D" Street in Lawton
