Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on May 1, 1907. Her father, a traveling salesman, moved the family to Colorado, where she learned to ride horses and shoot a gun. The family then moved to California and later to Los Angeles, where she attended high school. She was a popular student athlete and a cheerleader.
She began to work as a model when she was 16 years old and later made her first movie appearance at the age of 19
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In 1929 she married Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., but the marriage dissolved in 1933. In 1935 Joan married Franchot Tone (1905-1975), an actor who had appeared with her in several movies; they were divorced in 1940. She had two children by Tone: Barbara (born 1936) and Peter (born 1939).
After divorcing Tone in 1940, Joan moved to New York City and joined the Ruby Keeler Stock Company.
She acted in several Broadway plays and appeared frequently on television shows such as "The Red Skelton Show". She also appeared in several low-budget films, including "Jungle Queen" (1948), "I Wake Up Screaming" (1949), "One Way Street" (1950), and "The Hucksters" (1966).
In 1950 Crawford returned to Hollywood and signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she worked for seven years as a contract player—a studio employee who acts under contract with the studio to make films for them. She made more than thirty films with MGM and retired from acting after "Where Love Has Gone" (1957).
In 1959 Crawford married Louis B.
Mayer's son-in-law Robert De Niro; the marriage lasted two years. In 1961 she was admitted to the Motion Picture Hospital for an addiction of amphetamines which had begun while she was making "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962). She retired from acting shortly after this film's release.
Joan Crawford died of cardiac arrest on May 10, 1977 at her home in West Hollywood, California, at age 69.