1904-1977
Actress

An Adaptable Star.

One of the leading ladies of Depression Hollywood, Crawford was known for her ability to play just about any role, inhabiting romantic comedies (W. S. Van Dyke's Forsaking All Others [1934]; Edward H. Griffith and George Cukor'j No More Ladies [1935]), gangster films (Harry Beaumont's Dance Fools Dance [1931]), historical dramas (Clarence Brown's The Gorgeous Hussy [1936]), farces (Van Dyke's Love on the Run [1936]), vicious social comedies (Cukor's hit The Women), Depression melodramas (Brown's Possessed [1931]; Howard Hawks's Today We Live [1933]), romantic dramas (Beaumont's Laughing Sinners [1931]; Brown's Chained [1934]), and even ice-skating pictures (Ice Follies of 1939, directed by Reinhold Schunzel). She costarred with Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in Edmund Goulding's 1932 Grand Hotel, played opposite Norma Shearer and Rosalind Russell in The Women, and had on-screen romances with Clark Gable and with Franchot Tone, to whom she was also married. In short Joan Crawford was the consummate...