"I also consider her the greatest movie actress from the thirties to the fifties, if only for a handful of performances-indeed, for a handful of scenes. She was in few great films and not even many good ones, but her acting, at its peak, is different in kind from that of her similarly celebrated peers. Displaying both the most extreme artifice in self-presentation and the most authentic emotion in performance, she exemplifies Hollywood's paradoxes in concentrated form."
"He shows what the studio system did for and to its luminaries, how its mechanisms of assisted self-transcendence worked and what their effects were on those whom the system exalted and enriched. In Eyman's view, it was a social and professional bubble that put intense pressure on the extreme personalities who thrived there-of which Crawford's may be the supreme example-and who thus gave rise to the radical life styles and aesthetics for which classic Hollywood became known."
Joan Crawford combined extreme artifice in self-presentation with deeply authentic emotional performances, creating a paradoxical and memorable screen presence. Her peak work is concentrated in a handful of scene-defining moments rather than a large number of great films. The Hollywood studio system both facilitated and shaped stardom through mechanisms of assisted self-transcendence that elevated luminaries while imposing intense pressures. That studio-created social and professional bubble encouraged radical lifestyles and aesthetics among celebrated personalities. Crawford's life and career illustrate how the system transformed performers, and her early records include a missing birth certificate suggesting family concealment or loss.
Read at The New Yorker
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