American actress Joan Crawford was BOTD in (probably) 1904. Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, she survived a horrific childhood, marked by poverty and sexual abuse. She began her stage career as a dancer, shimmying her way to Broadway (and possibly starring in lesbian porn films to make money). Signed to a studio contract in 1925, she became one of 1930s Hollywood’s greatest stars, playing a glamorous flapper in Our Dancing Daughters, romantic heroines in Possessed, Grand Hotel and Chained and a working class battler in Sadie McKee. Labelled box office poison in 1938, she made a comeback as a venomous home-wrecker in George Cukor‘s all-female comedy The Women and an embattled waitress in Mildred Pierce, for which she won an Oscar. She burned through the 1940s in a series of box-office hits, including Humoresque, Possessed and Daisy Kenyon and radiated butch lesbian chic as a black-shirted cowgirl in Johnny Guitar. After several years in decline, she made a comeback with the horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, pairing her with long-term rival Bette Davis. The film was a critical and commercial success, though she was enraged when only Davis was nominated for an Oscar. She is thought to have campaigned against Davis winning, and arranged to accept the award on behalf of eventual winner Anne Bancroft. Baby Jane failed to resuscitate her career, and she spent the next 20 years in low-budget horror films, retiring in 1970 after her final (terrible) film Trog. She died in 1977, reportedly aged 69 (or 73, depending on which birth certificate you believe). Married and divorced five times, she had four adopted children. Her reputation was comprehensively trashed by her daughter Christina’s 1978 memoir Mommy Dearest, revealing Crawford as a deranged alcoholic who beat her children with coat-hangers. The book, followed by Faye Dunaway’s over-the-top performance in the 1981 biopic of the same name, established Crawford as a Monstrous Mother for the ages, perversely adding to her popularity with queer audiences. Her carefully constructed star persona and glamorous femininity played in counterpoint to her fierce androgynous energy, intriguing generations of queer scholars and endlessly imitated by drag queens, notably Lypsinka, whose show The Passion of the Crawford has become a staple of the New York drag scene. Crawford’s reputation was partially salvaged in Ryan Murphy’s 2017 television series Feud: Bette and Joan, starring Jessica Lange as a damaged, despairing Crawford.