Mommie Dearest (film)

Mommie Dearest is a 1981 American biographical drama film about Joan Crawford and the abusive relationship she had with her adopted daughter Christina Crawford and her adopted son Christopher, starring Faye Dunaway, Mara Hobel and Diana Scarwid. The film was directed by Frank Perry. The story was adapted for the screen by Robert Getchell, Tracy Hotchner, Frank Perry, and Frank Yablans, based on the 1978 autobiography of the same name by Christina Crawford. The executive producers were Christina's husband, David Koontz, and Terrence O'Neill, Dunaway's then-boyfriend and soon-to-be husband. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures, the only one of the "Big 8" film studios for which Crawford had never appeared in a feature film.

The film was a commercial success, grossing $39 million worldwide from a $5 million budget. Despite negative reviews, it has since become a cult classic.

Plot

Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) is a driven actress and compulsively clean housekeeper who tries to control the lives of those around her as tightly as she controls herself. To prepare for a work day at MGM Studios, she rises at 4:00 a.m. and engages in a strict morning ritual: scrubbing her face and arms with soap and boiling hot water, then plunging her face into a bowl of rubbing alcohol and ice to close the pores. When Helga (Alice Nunn), a new maid, thinks she has Joan's living room in spotless condition, Joan finds one minor detail that she overlooked and loses her temper.

Mommie Dearest

Mommie Dearest is a memoir and exposé written by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of actress Joan Crawford. The book, which depicts Christina's childhood and her relationship with her mother, was published in 1978.

Christina Crawford's claims

In the book, Christina Crawford claims that she was a victim of child abuse during her mother's battle with alcoholism and that her mother was more concerned about being an actress than a mother, suggesting she may have adopted children as a publicity stunt to promote her acting career. She implies Joan had a long list of affairs with men whom Christina was required to call "Uncle" and rarely "Daddy", and claims Joan also had many affairs with women. Christina suggests that as she grew older and more difficult to control, Joan found excuses to remove Christina from the home by sending her to various boarding schools and strict religious academies, often insuring in her instructions that Christina be allowed no contact with the outside world. Often these schools were used as a means of retribution for Christina defying her mother or fighting back against abusive behaviour.

Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford (March 23, 1904 – May 10, 1977), born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American film and television actress who started as a dancer and stage chorine. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Crawford tenth on their list of the greatest female stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

Beginning her career as a dancer in travelling theatrical companies before debuting as a chorus girl on Broadway, Crawford signed a motion picture contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled, and later outlasted, MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hard-working young women who find romance and success. These stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money, and, by the end of the 1930s, she was labelled "Box Office Poison". But her career gradually improved in the early 1940s, and she made a major comeback in 1945 by starring in Mildred Pierce, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She would go on to receive Best Actress nominations for Possessed (1947) and Sudden Fear (1952).

Faye Dunaway

Dorothy Faye Dunaway (born January 14, 1941) is an American actress, best known for her starring roles in films from the 1960s onwards.

Dunaway’s career began in the early 1960s on Broadway. She made her screen debut in the 1967 film The Happening, and rose to fame that same year with the gangster film Bonnie and Clyde, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination. Her most notable films include the crime caper The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), the neo-noir mystery Chinatown (1974), for which she earned her second Oscar nomination, the action-drama disaster The Towering Inferno (1974), the political thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) and the satirical Network (1976), for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Dunaway's career evolved to more mature and character roles in subsequent years, often in independent films, beginning with her controversial portrayal of Joan Crawford in the 1981 film Mommie Dearest. Other notable films in which she has starred include the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), the drama Barfly (1987) and the surrealist comedy-drama Arizona Dream (1993).

Christina Crawford

Christina Crawford (born June 11, 1939) is an American writer and actress, best known as the author of Mommie Dearest, an autobiographical account of alleged child abuse by her adoptive mother, famous Hollywood actress Joan Crawford. She is also known for small roles in various television and film projects, such as Joan Borman Kane in the soap opera The Secret Storm and Monica George in the Elvis Presley vehicle Wild in the Country.

Early life and education

Crawford was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1939 to unmarried teen parents.

According to Christina Crawford's personal interview with Larry King, her father supposedly in the Navy, was married to another woman while her mother was unmarried. Christina Crawford was adopted from a baby broker in the state of Nevada because Joan Crawford was formerly denied an adoption by Social Services for being an unfit candidate in California in 1940. Christina Crawford maintains that Joan Crawford did not have a positive relationship with her own mother or with her brother, which contributed to Social Services' conclusion, as well as her multiple divorces. Subsequent documentation showed that the adoption was handled by Georgia Tann through Tann's infamous Tennessee Children's Home Society. Christina was one of five children adopted by Joan Crawford.