Joan Crawford and star acting in Mildred Pierce

Abstract

In 1946 Joan Crawford won her first and only Academy Award. After working in Hollywood for twenty years and making over sixty films, she received from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Mildred Pierce (1945). A Hollywood headliner since the 1920s, Crawford had regularly featured on magazine covers and between 1930 and 1936 she consistently made the top ten in box-office polls with hit films for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Although she played opposite several of the most acclaimed actors of her generation, including John Barrymore, her glamorous public persona tended to outweigh her reputation as an actor, so that when she left MGM and signed to Warner Bros. at the end of June 1943 there was a question over whether she could hold her own against the studio's leading star, Bette Davis.1 With Mildred Pierce, Crawford proved that she could take on the kind of roles that had consistently won Davis critical acclaim, and could bring a degree of strength to these that was rarely seen in Hollywood. Consequently, her performance as Mildred Pierce changed public perception about her work as a screen actor.