After Mommie Dearest, her only strong leading role came in Barfly (1987), in which she excels playing an alcoholic woman opposite Mickey Rourke. Anyone who has seen Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Chinatown (1974) knows how fantastic Dunaway can be with good direction and a good script. While Dunaway is more willing today to talk about Mommie Dearest, her reluctance to embrace a film that hobbled her status as a Hollywood great is understandable. The horror of seeing her daughter trying to match her speaks of a deep self-loathing. When the adult Christina tries her hand at acting and is forced by illness to temporarily abandon her soap opera, in steps Joan to take her part, killing her daughter’s achievements by turning up drunk and forgetting her lines. Despite her claims of pride that Christina may be following in her footsteps (“Something good had to rub off”), Dunaway’s Joan is triggered into fury when she sees young Christina trying to emulate her by using her hair products or imitating her in front of her dolls.
She briefly seems a sad, lonely woman in desperate need of constant approval from her fans. When the film takes a breath and shows Crawford at her calmest, the viewer sees Joan’s vulnerability. Dunaway does an excellent job of conveying Crawford’s fear of returning to poverty and, ironically, her terror of ridicule and rejection from her devotees. © 2017 Open Road Media (Ebook): 9781504049085The film is at its best when it shows some affection for poor Joan. This ebook edition features an exclusive new introduction by the author, plus rare photographs from her personal collection and one hundred pages of revealing material not found in the original manuscript. She endured and survived, becoming the voice of so many other victims who suffered in silence, and giving them the courage to forge a productive life out of chaos. A fierce battle of wills, their relationship could be characterized as an ultimately successful, for Christina, struggle for independence. But at home, her lonely, controlling, even ruthless mother made her life a nightmare. It also shed light on the guarded world of Hollywood and stripped away the façade of Christina’s relentless, alcoholic abuser: her adoptive mother, movie star Joan Crawford.Ĭhristina was a young girl shown off to the world as a fortunate little princess. When Christina Crawford’s harrowing chronicle of child abuse was first published in 1978, it brought global attention to the previously closeted subject. The 40th anniversary edition of the “shocking” #1 New York Times bestseller with an exclusive new introduction by the author (Los Angeles Times).
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