Joan Crawford: ambitious, regretful — and deliciously wicked

Joan Crawford never made any secret of her humble background, nor of her fierce ambition. “I came from nothing,” she liked to tell interviewers in her later years, “but Hollywood took me from nothing and gave me everything good that I’ve learnt and that I have.” MGM had hired plain Lucille LeSueur, the working-class daughter of a single mother from San Antonio, Texas, and transformed her into the glamorous Joan Crawford — even inviting the public to enter a competition to invent her new name. So this workaholic star repaid the studio’s investment by maintaining the strictest possible control of her precious image for decades. Success had not come easy, and she wasn’t going to let it slip through her fingers.

Until the end of her long career on screen, she prided herself on her all-out professionalism, working diligently at her roles and never leaving the house unless she looked every inch the movie star. But she did more than work hard. Crawford exerted creative control over her image and pushed for the roles she wanted to play. Her best performances tapped into her own personality and life story and, as they did so, resonated with her audience, the millions of Lucilles who went to see her films.

Crawford arrived in Hollywood in 1925, where she found an early calling as a flapper in silent movies. It was in the 1930s, though, that she first outlined her ideal screen type — something more complicated than a good-time girl. Outside cinemas, the Great Depression was biting, but inside them Hollywood was still slathering the screen with sex, violence and intoxicating substances before the diktats of the Production Code took hold. Crawford was at her best as young women with heads for heights: attractive, ambitious and determined to drag themselves from the wrong side of the tracks. In films such as Dancing Lady (1933) and The Bride Wore Red (1937), Crawford played working-class girls who in the right frock can pass for society ladies, choosing between two men and between two lifestyles.

In 1939, Crawford surprised everyone by fighting for a second-string part in an ensemble comedy, a role that might have pre-empted the later years of her career, when she dipped increasingly into self-parody, but instead became a triumph. Again, she would play a working girl on the make, but this time she was the villain rather than the star. In the 19-to-the-dozen all-female caper The Women, Crawford played Crystal Allen, a conniving hussy who works behind a perfume counter and sleeps with Norma Shearer’s husband on the side. Shearer, as the patient, angelic and wronged Mary, is the star of the picture, although Rosalind Russell steals the show as her gossipy friend Sylvia. Crawford, however, is deliciously wicked as Crystal. We wait half an hour for her to appear, while the rest of the cast speculate about the mystery adulteress, and when we finally meet her, she’s a powerhouse: multitasking at work while manipulating her lover on the telephone. She is by turns fragile, vicious and richly seductive.

Crawford and Shearer were openly feuding on set, and when Crystal and Mary confront each other on screen, it’s a moment to savour. Crystal is charging an extravagant wardrobe to Mary’s husband’s account when Mary sweeps her eyes over her skimpy gold ensemble and observes: “He doesn’t like such obvious effects.” Crystal replies: “When anything I wear doesn’t please Stephen, I take it off.”

Despite Crawford’s success as Crystal, by the 1940s her popularity was on the decline. One year before The Women was released, the Independent Film Journal had included her on a list of stars who were “poison” at the box office, and in 1943, MGM asked her to buy her way out of her contract. Crawford saw an opportunity. Her agent secured her a deal at a more welcoming studio, Warner Bros, which paid handsomely and gave her approval of scripts and directors.

Crawford received her Oscar for ‘Mildred Pierce’ at home in bed because she was too nervous to attend the ceremony

The film Crawford wanted to make next was Mildred Pierce, an adaptation of a 1941 James M Cain novel. Michael Curtiz was assigned to the job and Crawford lobbied hard for the lead. Where Crawford’s 1930s roles are often about ambition, one could say that Mildred Pierce is about regret. The film follows the rise and fall of Mildred, a housewife and mother-of-two who wants a better life for her daughters, especially her demanding eldest, Veda. To the novel’s melodramatic plot, Ranald MacDougall’s biting screenplay added a murder, and a film noir twist. It’s a breathtaking film, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Crawford inhabiting the role better, though she is supported by Ann Blyth as her toxic daughter and Eve Arden as her witty but embittered colleague. While the film received several Oscar nominations, Crawford was the only winner, receiving the statuette at home in bed because she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. She made many more excellent, and similarly transgressive women’s pictures in the 1950s, but this vicious melodrama may be her defining role.

Crawford knew that the hungry girls who had lapped up her movies in the 1930s would be eager to see the struggles of the next phase of their lives on the screen too. Mildred wasn’t deciding between the dazzling possibilities of careers and beaux, but coming to terms with the bitter consequences of her previous choices. Perhaps that’s why she was so nervous on Oscar night — because the award wasn’t just for Joan, but for Lucille, too.

Crystal and Mildred opened the door for Crawford to take on increasingly unsympathetic roles. She played a brittle alcoholic in Humoresque (1946), a housewife who falls in with the mob in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), and a manipulative socialite in Queen Bee (1955). She’s especially good in Sudden Fear (1952) as a famous playwright who marries a vicious criminal — another fool for love, who pays the consequences. In Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), now a critical favourite, she plays a tough and increasingly isolated saloon owner who spits: “All a woman has to do is slip once and she’s a ‘tramp!’” She tells her ex lover: “Must be a great comfort to you to be a man.”

Last year’s FX TV drama series Feud: Bette and Joan highlighted the next phase of her career, the third, brave comeback co-starring opposite her rival Bette Davis in the camp horror Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), itself a story of two has-beens clinging on to their glory days. The film and the TV series together constitute a powerful thesis on what it means to be a female star in Hollywood, how soon the ageism sets in, and how quickly your image can be contorted, or simply forgotten. Clinging on to this last phase of her career, Crawford starred in a clutch of other horror movies, including the circus-set Berserk! (1967) and the notorious “missing link” movie Trog (1970). After that last film, following a career just touching six decades, Crawford retired, and died in 1977.

She had made many films to be proud of, but in 1978 her public image was blighted by a savage memoir, Mommie Dearest, written by her oldest adoptive child, Christina. The book outlines a miserable childhood, in which Crawford bullied and abused her daughter, accusations that have not been corroborated by all of Christina’s siblings. In 1981, it was made into a rather ropey film, whose pleasures are all unintentional, with Faye Dunaway as a screeching caricature of Crawford, tormenting her child for such petty crimes as using the wrong kind of coat hanger.

That’s no way to remember a legend such as Crawford, but perhaps it was inevitable. If she had been a little more vain, and projected a sentimental ideal of virtuous womanhood in all her films, we might never have fallen for the idea that she was a monster. But then she’d never have been Joan Crawford, the star who meant much more than all the others.

‘Fierce: The Untameable Joan Crawford’, from August 1, BFI Southbank, London, bfi.org.uk. ‘The Women’ and ‘Mildred Pierce’ are re-released in the UK on August 17