Joan Crawford

You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed.

Joan Crawford (born Lucille Fay LeSueur; 23 March 1905 – 10 May 1977) was an American actress, singer, and businesswoman.

Quotes

• I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.
  • Interview, Los Angeles Times (1937)

• I think that the most important thing a woman can have - next to talent, of course - is her hairdresser.
  • Interview, Hollywood Reporter (1942)

• You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed.
  • Interview, Hedda Hoppers Hollywood (1945)

• I believe in the dollar. Everything I earn, I spend!
  • Interview, Los Angeles Sentinel (1946)

• If you've earned a position, be proud of it. Don't hide it. I want to be recognized. When I hear people say, 'There's Joan Crawford!' I turn around and say, 'Hi! How are you!'
  • Interview, Los Angeles Times (1947)

• I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty... in every form.
  • Interview, Hollywood Reporter (1949)

• Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.
  • Interview, Hollywood Reporter (1954)

• If you have an ounce of common sense and one good friend you don't need an analyst.
  • Interview, New York Times (1964)

• Women's Lib? Poor little things. They always look so unhappy. Have you noticed how bitter their faces are?
  • Interview, New York Times (1972)

• It has been said that on screen I personified the American woman.
  • Interview, New York Times (1972)

• Learn to breathe, learn to speak, but first..learn to feel.
  • Interview, Town Hall (1973)

Quotes about

• Every Negro in America is in one way or another menaced by it. One is born in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, where all the standards and all the images . . . when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you. You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.
  • 1961 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

• Then there was Queen Bee—a Joan Crawford soap. She wrote me a welcoming note saying how she'd always admired veterans of the silent days. And I never had the courage to inform her I was actually a year younger than she was. On every Crawford picture, she had a younger cast member to berate and on this one, when she had to slap pretty little Lucy Marlow, she did so with such fury it could be heard all over the sound stage.
  • Fay Wray, as quoted in Classic Film Stars: Interviews from Hollywood's Golden Era (2016) by James Bawden and Ron Miller, p. 273