Joan Crawford

Born Lucille Fay LeSueur, Crawford danced in traveling shows before Broadway led to an MGM contract in 1925. She built herself into a flapper icon through sheer publicity effort, then spent the 1930s playing Depression-era rags-to-riches heroines that made her one of the highest-paid women in America - until the films stopped making money and the industry labeled her box office poison. After nearly two years off screen, she came back in Mildred Pierce (1945) and won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She married Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele in 1955, joined the company's board after his death in 1959, and stayed until 1973. Crawford adopted five children; her relationship with the two eldest, Christina and Christopher, was bitter enough that she disinherited them both. After her final film, Trog, in 1970, she withdrew from public life entirely - then Christina published Mommie Dearest and turned the Crawford name into shorthand for maternal cruelty.