Joan Crawford became an expert at controlling her image. Born a redhead, she's much better known as a brunette. She hid her natural freckles with makeup (via Biography). Whereas she normally kept her eyebrows pencil-thin, she sometimes experimented with different thicknesses and with lining her lower eyes (via CR Fashion Book). She reportedly rinsed her eyes in boric acid twice a day to keep them looking bright and shiny (via Harper's Bazaar).

The biggest change of all was her name. She was born Lucille LeSueur around 1904 (though the year remains a matter of dispute). Her stepfather convinced her to rename herself Billie Cassin in her vaudeville days. She later returned to her birth name, but as a rising star at MGM in the late 1920s, studio head Louis B. Mayer felt her name seemed fake and sounded too much like sewer. He initiated a contest with a $1,000 prize to rename her. She wasn't crazy about her new name, thinking Crawford sounded like crawfish (via Biography).

A style icon in her youth, she refused to be seen in public for the last three years of her life after seeing unflattering pictures of herself in a 1974 appearance at the Rainbow Room in New York. According to Joan Crawford Best, she said, "if that's how I look, they won't see me again." She died of cancer in 1977.

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