JOAN CRAWFORD

For almost 50 years, Joan Crawford (1905-77) reigned as one of the great stars of the silver screen, evolving from a free-spirited flapper in her movies of the 1920s into an all-American working girl of the Great Depression, before eventually playing cool, driven, independent women with troublesome passions and neuroses concealed beneath a classy, well-coiffed exterior in numerous melodramas and film noir classics of the 1940s. Though her career declined with the studio system itself in the 1950s, Crawford soldiered on in her chosen profession, bringing a touch of old Hollywood glamour to the industry in an era that was no longer worthy of her.