Born Lucille Fay LeSueur, of French-Huguenot, English, Dutch, and Irish ancestry in San Antonio, Texas, she was the second of the two children of Thomas E. LeSueur (born January 2, 1867, in Tennessee; died January 1, 1938), a construction worker, and Anna Bell Johnson (died August 15, 1958), later known as Anna Cassin.
Crawford was only five feet three. A blue-eyed redhead, she hid her freckles with makeup. Her shoulders were so wide that a studio couturier, despairing of reducing them, decided to exaggerate them instead. Padded shoulders became her fashion trademark.
How many biological children did Joan Crawford have?
Despite her multiple marriages, Joan Crawford never gave birth to her biological children. She adopted five children during her lifetime. Her first daughter was Christina, born in 1939. Following her mother's footsteps, she became an actress, appearing in soap operas such as “The Secret Storm.”
Christina has repeatedly stated that the film is highly inaccurate, and that the portrayal of her mother in the film is nothing like the real Joan Crawford, emphasizing that she never wrote in her book that Joan chopped down a tree with an axe, or beat her with a wire hanger as depicted in the film.
The three-time Oscar nominee tells the magazine how she thought the memorable role was going to be a "window into a tortured soul," but in the end, she found it to be very different, even harmful to her career.
Even though she had had four husbands — actors Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Franchot Tone, and Phillip Terry and Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele — and many lovers, Crawford was always close to Clark Gable.
In the 1990s, the twins reconnected with their biological family in Tennessee. Cynthia died on October 14, 2007. Cathy died on January 11, 2020, of lung cancer.
Did Joan Crawford get her children from Georgia Tann?
Notable personalities who used Tann's services included actress Joan Crawford (twin daughters, Cathy and Cynthia were adopted through the agency while daughter Christina Crawford and son Christopher were adopted through other agencies).
Cindy Crawford the model, is not one of Joan Crawford's twins. She was born in 1966. Joan Crawford's twins were born almost 20 years earlier in 1947. Joan's daughter Cindy died in 2007, and her twin Cathy died recently in 2020.
She made such a positive impression during her early film career that MGM head Louis B. Mayer launched a fan-magazine contest to find her a new name. The result was "Joan Crawford," a name she claimed she never liked. Her career with MGM stretched from 1925 to 1942, and she became one of that company's biggest stars.
It was also due in part to her DIY anti-aging routine that kept her complexion looking young and taut: she gave herself an “ice” water facial. “I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty… in every form,” the actress once said.
Joan Crawford (born March 23, 1904?, San Antonio, Texas, U.S.—died May 10, 1977, New York, New York) was an American motion-picture actress who made her initial impact as a vivacious Jazz Age flapper but later matured into a star of psychological melodramas.
Over time, her skin seemed to tighten, freezing in place; to compensate, her eyebrows were made thicker, her lipliner more curved. It was as if she were sculpting an image of a woman out of the raw materials of her face. Crawford's awareness of her face was compulsive and obsessive.
Crawford left about $2 million in her will. On October 28, 1976, less than a year before her death, she had made a new will. She left a trust fund of $77,500 to each of her adopted twin daughters, $35,000 to her longtime friend and secretary, Betty Barker, and smaller bequests to a few other people.
Crawford's children don't all agree with the legacy of Christina's tell-all book, and because of that family feud, Joan Crawford's twins, Cathy and Cindy, have stayed largely out of the spotlight.
Joan Crawford was born Lucille LeSueur, but her studio thought her surname sounded too much like "sewer." So, her stage name was decided via a magazine competition.
But when her eldest adoptive daughter, Christina Crawford, released the tell-all memoir Mommie Dearest in 1978 — within a year of Crawford's death — it painted a much darker picture of the actress, one of an alcoholic and abusive mother prone to fits of rage.
The animosity began when Bette fell in love with her leading man, heartthrob Franchot Tone, in the 1935 film, Dangerous. As the pair began dating, she soon found herself smitten. But when the newly divorced Joan later set eyes on him, so was she.
In the movie, it shows us four mental disorders that Joan Crawford suffered from. These disorders are bipolar disorder, histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Christina Crawford is an American author and actress, best known for her 1978 memoir and exposé, Mommie Dearest, which described the alleged abuse she was subjected to by her adoptive mother, film star Joan Crawford.
Years earlier, in a quote Dunaway gleefully repeated in the book, Crawford had declared, “of all the actresses, to me, only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.” Dunaway said she hoped her portrayal would “even the scales,” as she told Hollywood biographer Jane Ardmore ...
