Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
 |
| A bedridden Joan Crawford admires her Oscar |
We can argue about what Joan Crawford was and what she became, but one truth persists: No one before or since fought harder to become and remain a movie star than she did, over almost half a century in movies. From
Pretty Ladies in 1925 to
Trog in 1970 she was a force for producers, directors, co-stars, and studio executives to contend with. And after twenty years in the business, she finally found the definitive role: a determined woman who makes a fortune in business but is almost undone by her poor taste in husbands and her spoiled daughter. If you want to superimpose Mildred Pierce on Joan Crawford née Lucille LeSueur, go ahead. She was nominated two more times after her Oscar win, and when her film career began to sag in the mid-1950s, she found a rich husband, Alfred Steele, the chairman of Pepsi-Cola, and when he died after three years of marriage tried to run the company herself, along with resuming her film career, instead of settling into a comfortable retirement. After the success of the grotesque
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? she accepted roles in low-budget horror movies like
Berserk and
Trog, and guest appearances on TV series like "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and "Rod Serling's Night Gallery." (In the latter she was directed by twenty-three-year-old Steven Spielberg.) And as most people know, her image was tarnished posthumously by the tell-all memoir
Mommie Dearest, by her adopted daughter Christina, and the 1981 movie in which she's played (or overplayed) by Faye Dunaway. But it's also worth recalling the insecurities that propelled her, and which, on the night of her triumph, led her to take to her bed with a fever. When she heard on the radio that she had won, she recovered and greeted the press in a dressing gown once the Oscar had been delivered to her. Even if I didn't think she deserved the Oscar for the movie, and I do, she deserved it for that performance alone.
 |
| Ann Blyth and Crawford in Mildred Pierce |
No comments:
Post a Comment