Crawford's oldest child, Christina, alleged that her mother physically and emotionally abused her and Christopher in her 1978 tell-all memoir Mommie Dearest. (The book was ultimately told on ...

(Crawford died in 1977.) “She had learned how to be a dancer, she had learned how to be an actress, she had learned how to be a star,” Christina writes of her mother in Mommie Dearest.

Christina Crawford opened up about the film’s famous title, saying that, “‘Mommie dearest’ was a term of enslavement. If we just called her ‘Mother’ or ‘Mommy,’ she corrected us ...

Paramount Pictures Share Author A. Ashley Hoff met Christina Crawford, who wrote the tell-all exposé about her movie-star mother Joan Crawford, at a 1998 screening of the book’s movie ...