The next year she won a small part in a silent MGM picture, "Pretty ladies." The studio liked her, changed her name to Joan Crawford, gave her a new contract and the full PR treatment. After that chorus girl job in Missiouri, she landed in New York where she wound up in another chorus, for "Inocent Eyes" of 1924. She was born Lucile Le Sueur on March 23, 1908, in San Antonio, Tex. What one did not see was her clickety-click mind that could remember not only names of people she had met briefly years before, but what, at a large cocktail party, her guests were drinking. Large eyes, eyebrows that changed shape and position over the years, a wide mouth like a gash of red on always pale skin, high cheekbones and broad shoulders were her visible characteristics. It was a career that would make her one of the most recognizable women in the world, an Oscar-winner for "Mildred Pierce" of 1945, a style-setter for worldwide fashions, and the wife of three noted actors, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franchot Tone and Philip Terry each of whom she woudl divorce. She had settled in New York at the time of her marriage to Alfred Steele, chairman of the baord of Pepsi-Cola, who died within hours of a visit the couple made to Washington in 1959.įor the past several years, while continuing on the Pepsi board, she had made public talks on programs featuring scenes from major films in her career that began in the chorus of a touring company in Missiouri while she was still in her teens. Though inactive in recent months, the film star had had no history of heart trouble. One of her two household maids had found Miss Crawford's body at about 10 a.m. Cowan, in making the announcement at her home. "It's the end of an era and a legend," said her lawyer, Edward S. Joan Crawford died yesterday at the age of 69 after a heart attack in the bedroom of her Upper East Side New York apartment.
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