Christina worked for 14 years as an actress on stage, in film (including a small part in a movie starring Elvis Presley) and on television. The documentary also tells the story of Christina’s life, starting with her adoption as an infant, and then her experience growing up with such a mother (“We were all props in her fantasy”) and what her life has been like as an adult. The documentary itself has the feel of a homemade production as it tells the story of Joan Crawford’s life and career, dotted with moments that seem motivated by malice and resentment – we hear that the movie star tried to get rid of all copies of a pornographic film she made early in her career, and then see home movies of Joan Crawford cavorting around a Hollywood pool with a very young and naked Christina. Every now and then during the showing of the documentary, the live Christina Crawford comes back out and talks over it.
Christina Crawford comes out to tell that joke, talk about her early love of theater, and introduce the documentary. “Surviving Mommie Dearest: Tears to Triumph” is a hybrid of a live show and a documentary. “Mommie Dearest” is also the title of a famously campy 1981 movie starring Faye Dunaway that Christina Crawford says she hates.
It is an awkward joke, based on the (correct) assumption that the audience would know from the get-go about the child abuse by her mother, an experience that she wrote about in a best-selling 1978 memoir, “Mommie Dearest.” The title is what Joan Crawford insisted that Christina call her. “I’d been locked in closets before, but never by a stranger…” “Surviving Mommie Dearest” Clockwise from top left: Joan Crawford and her adopted daughter Christina book cover of the memoir Christina Crawford wrote Christina Crawford as a young actress and today scenes from the movie “Mommie Dearest” with Faye Dunaway, which Christina Crawford hates.Īt the beginning of “Surviving Mommie Dearest,” an odd show that will run from May 8th to Mother’s Day at the Snapple Theater, Christina Crawford, the 73-year-old adopted daughter of movie star Joan Crawford, explains that when she moved to New York City as a teenager to be an actress, she lived in a rooming house where the tenants of an entire floor shared a single water closet, and that once when she was using the facilities, a visitor parked his bike against the door and effectively locked her in.
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