Joan Crawford

American film actress, born in 1904. A MGM contract star from the late 1920s through the 1940s, she defined the flapper and then the ambitious working woman in a string of pre-Code and Depression-era pictures. She appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and later won an Academy Award for Mildred Pierce (1945). Her career outlasted most of her contemporaries, running into the horror boom of the 1960s.