(1904 – 1977) Glamour, ambition and drive crystallized a star quality around Crawford that carried her through decades of success, although the off-screen cost of these qualities pervaded a muckraking biography (Mommie Dearest, 1978) and a highly stylized film biography in which Faye Dunaway portrayed her as a consummate monster (1981). Yet Crawford on screen often moved outside the comfort zone of gender stereotypes, whether in her wild roles in the 1920s or her working-girl personae of the 1930s. Crawford reinvented herself as the suffering mother in Mildred Pierce (1945) and later as a harridan opposite Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1974). Her vivid image has lived beyond her both in the impact of her films as a chronicle of women and imagery and in the destruction of that star figure through Mommie Dearest.