There are many varieties of star in the celestial firmament: shooting, hot, luminous, exotic, cool, giant, supergiant, andâof courseâdegenerate. These descriptions can be quite readily mapped onto human stars too, and the range and variable intensity of the array of stars in the movie firmament is part of the reason why the figure of the star has always fascinated and continues to do so today. One of the most inescapable realities of the realm of stardom is that some stars endure across the decades, enjoying lengthy and high-profile careers, while others fade away, either into obscurity or crystallised at a specific moment in time. It is the phenomenon of variable endurance and longevity that this book investigates and attempts to understand.
The impetus for exploring this idea came from the editorsâ appreciation of High Society (1956) and the enduring stardom of Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly. As they slow-dance next to the swimming pool, gracefully intoxicated and dreamily romantic, Sinatra sings, âMind if I make love to youâ, and their images as the seductive blue-eyed crooner and the high-class âMiss Frigidaireâ with sexual fire in her belly, are captured in all their complexities and possibilities. The images of both stars varied hugely across their lifetimes, beyond their cinematic careers, and after their deaths (Kelly in 1982 and Sinatra in 1998). Sinatra emerged as an idol of the bobby-soxers, became a Hollywood movie actor, lived through desperate career lows, won an Oscar for his role in From Here to Eternity (1953), and went on to went on to become Chairman of the Board and consolidate his position as one of the greatest entertainers of all time. Kellyâs screen image was based on refinement, class, and poise, but always underscored with playfulness and a sense of mischief. Leaving Hollywood at the age of 26 and marrying a real-life prince ensured her image as Princess Grace was anointed with regal reality and European chic, and her status as icon of cool blonde beauty was accorded prominence despite her no longer having an on-screen career. Since her death, Kellyâs image as an emblem of dignity and refinement has been subverted by tell-all biographies describing her promiscuity and sexual voraciousness as a young woman. Sinatraâs posthumous reputation has become more overtly associated with the mafia and the Kennedys, but his musical career continues to flourish, with the show Sinatra: The Man and his Music playing at the London Palladium at the time of writing. Kelly was the subject of the widely derided Grace of Monaco, starring ice princess de jour Nicole Kidman, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. The star images of both Kelly and Sinatra not only endure then, but thrive, in the form of the continuing popularity of their own films and music, in contemporary incarnations, as well as in high-profile advertising campaigns: Kelly for LâOreal hair colour and Sinatra for Jack Danielâs. The other stars of High Society, Celeste Holm and Bing Crosby, are far less well known today: Crosby is essentially confined to Christmas popular music, and Holm is all but anonymous. Considering these actors and the elements of their star personas that make Kelly and Sinatra endure while Holm and Crosby have faded away formed the foundation for this bookâs inquiry, which examines a wide range of star images from different eras and national cinemas, and asks why they have lasted, why they have disappeared, or how they have simply survived.
Other stars, such as Mickey Rourke, lead high-profile rollercoaster careers consisting of catastrophic falls from grace and great successes in different eras. As Keri Walsh sets out at the beginning of her British Film Institute (BFI) volume on Rourke, there are many ways of approaching the question of why we should want to watch him (2014, p. 1). Walsh concludes that Rourke is âidiosyncratic and fascinatingly scarredâ (p. 108). His career and life story are an amalgam of rumour, self-promotion, and drama, veering from the grotesquery of excessive plastic surgery to the eccentricity of being accompanied by a pet Chihuahua. Many things have been said about Rourke, but one thing is clear: he endures. Walshâs detailed analysis of his persona cannot account for this endurance other than that he fascinates. Perhaps no full explanation can be given about the lasting appeal of some stars without hypothesising about the psychological motivations and desires of fans and spectators. It is clear that âstar images have historiesâ, as Richard Dyer observed, and his discipline-defining scholarship always stressed the temporality of the starâs structured polysemy (1998, p. 63). But, as Martin Shingler identifies in his overarching Star Studies: A Critical Guide, there is âconsiderable scope to extend the borders of knowledge and understandingâ of the star studies terrain (2012, p. 15). That is the aim of this volume: to further and deepen the understanding of which factors affect the persistence or transience of star images in different contexts. This endeavour thereby extends the discipline of star studies into new conceptual territory, bringing questions of race, nationality, age, gender, and sexuality into dialogue with the question of longevity, while also drawing on concepts such as time, colour, female genealogy, and the grotesque to explore the stardom of the chosen individuals in each chapter.
The range of stars in this book is eclectic and is designed to introduce as broad a range of new concepts for thinking about stardom in the context of longevity as possible. The book is divided into six sections. Section 1, Lasting Stardom, considers stars who have endured either by their own business sense or industrial diversification, or by their association with a national stereotype. Aparna Sharma demonstrates how Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has created a âbrand Bachchanâ that maintains his image in the public eye, enabling him to move from angry young man to a commanding prominent figure with a high presence on social media. Julie Lobalzo Wright shows how rapper Ice Cube has evolved from hip hop star to actor to auteur and major industrial player with his production company Cube Vision. Cube is now in a position to make his own biopic, with his son playing him, tracing his emergence in the early days of his band and his rap career. These chapters shed light on the extra-filmic work and diversification that can lead to a star becoming an industrial figure with cultural impact. Antonella Palmieriâs chapter on Sophia Loren and Gabor Gergelyâs on PĂĄl JĂĄvor show how the two stars have come to embody certain aspects of Italian femininity and Hungarian masculinity respectively. For Loren, embodying the stereotype of the sexy Italian woman who can cook wonderful pasta ensures her popularity as an Italian-American ideal in Grumpier Old Men (1995). JĂĄvor popularity is analysed in his own country, where he embodied a volatile and tempestuous type of masculinity seen as anti-establishment, apolitical but popular, and always as an honourable Hungarian.
Section 2, Faded Stardom, looks at actors who have been major Hollywood stars but who are not considered to be in the upper echelons of stardom today for very different reasons. Lies Lanckman explains how our cover star Norma Shearer, seen here as the epitome of 1930s glamour, became associated with very domesticated visions of love, and ultimately, widowhood, with a persona rooted in the tragic. Gillian Kelly analyses the perplexing anonymity of Robert Taylor, the handsome star, famed for his profile and irresistibility to women, whose career spanned the length of the studio system. Taylor may have had the longest contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), but is hardly known now, except to those who remember him from their cinema-going days in the 1940s and 1950s. Lucy Bolton looks at the complex and contradictory star image of Melanie Griffith and unravels the elements that have gone towards inhibiting her career. Griffithâs stardom persists, and Bolton argues that this is the result of her uniquely high-profile female genealogy, as well as her off-screen life that continues to challenge and provoke as a combination of youthful rebellion and mature, maternal, femininity.
Directly engaging with questions of ageing on-screen, Section 3 looks at very different presentations of advancing years. Fiona Handyside examines the ways in which director Michael Haneke has explored how the technology of the medium of cinema can be used to draw attention to the star bodies of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintingnant in Amour (2012). Siting this exploration as an authorial project, Handyside shows how the fimmaker focuses on the deterioration of star bodies, and reflects upon stars having their images on-screen for a lifetime, and on our relationship to viewing and remembering those images. There is no more agonising exploration of the aged star image than the trials of Buster Keaton in Film (1965), written by Samuel Beckett. Paul Flaig contrasts the power of this short with the conventional biopic The Buster Keaton Story (1957) in order to show how the former confronts the starâs alienation from his own earlier self, as well as what he is now, whereas the latter peddles in traditional discourses about the march of time and the coming of sound. These powerful, original, and conceptual takes on the depiction of aged stars represent an intriguing new approach to thinking through the decayed star image and how the stars are themselves implicated in such depictions. From a more historical perspective, Adrian Garvey looks at the long career of James Mason, from Gainsborough melodrama, through his experimental sojourn in Hollywood, and final return to playing an elderly English gentleman. Garvey carefully traces the shifts in Masonâs persona, particularly in terms of his masculinity, and observes how changing styles of film performance afforded Mason career longevity and adaptability despite the conflicts between the roles he could get and the ones he wanted. This section, then, takes the theme of ageingâwhich is becoming a popular topic in celebrity and cultural studies, with the work of scholars such as Deborah Jermyn (2013), Deborah Jermyn and Su Holmes (2015), and Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne (2014)âand thinks through some of the issues that specifically pertain to cinema and film stars.
As mentioned in relation to Kelly and Sinatra, a good deal of morphing and mutilation of star images occurs posthumously, and this concept frames Section 4. Lisa Bode juxtaposes the iconic Rudolph Valentino and the now obscure Wallace Reid, and asks what happened to their careers and images to make their places in cultural memory so dichotomous. The answer, it seems, lies in posthumous manipulations of their images, one to become associated with eroticism and aesthetic progress, the other with scandal and a repression of his film work. The role of the starsâ families in each case was significant in the manipulation, and in her chapter on Spencer Tracy, Hannah Graves highlights the role played by the producer Stanley Kramer in shaping Tracyâs style of masculinity whilst alive and at the time of his death. Tracyâs end-of-career image had become Kramerâs political and auteurist project, and Graves explores the relationship between the various agendas at play in the formation and perpetuation of that image. With a more commercial aim in mind, the branding of starsâ images after they are dead can be a lucrative business, capitalising as it can on the influential associations of the stars concerned. Lisa Patti considers the transnational, political, star image of Marlon Brando and its posthumous rebranding as all-American, particularly in a commercial for MasterCard. This section, therefore, asks us to consider the range of other people invested in a starâs image, and the possibilities it offers for appropriation, manipulation, and commercialisation.
Section 5, looks at stars who share their image with a fictional character, a series or a type, and considers how this relationship affects the existence of the star outside this shared image. Considering the later-life stardom of Margaret Rutherford, Claire Mortimer shows how Rutherfordâs persona lent itself perfectly to the emblematic British eccentric, and how this enabled her to achieve international stardom in a series of performances based on her age, gender and social class. The once dismissed ânon-Bondâ, George Lazenby, is recuperated in Jaap Verheulâs analysis of the casting, shooting, promotion, and remembering of On Her Majestyâs Secret Service (1969). Now perceived as one of the Bonds closest to Daniel Craigâs ruthless, no-frills incarnation, Lazenby might be considered to be the aficionadoâs Bond, with a respect and affection hitherto reserved for Sean Connery. In her exploration of the image of Molly Ringwald, Frances Smith demonstrates how a star can encapsulate the unfixed nature of stardom by both fading and enduring. Ringwaldâs greatest film stardom was in the 1980s, when she epitomised for many a certain type of teenage girlhood, and yet she still works as an actress, singer, and newspaper columnist, with an active profile on social media. Sylvester Stalloneâs type, however, is shown to endure into a new age of âgeri-actionâ movies. Glen Donnar shows how Stalloneâs embracing of the limits of his action-star image, and his deliberate replaying of both the genre and the type, enable him to extend his film performances beyond that which a more diverse range of roles would allow. Therefore, the association of a star with a type, or a character, outside their own personal traits and individuality can be seen to hinder, enable, or indeed engender a rebirth in a starâs image.
The final section looks at ways in which factors from outside the film industry can have a monumental impact on the endurance of a starâs image. Linda Marchant discusses the hugely prolific photographer Cornel Lucas and demonstrates the impact his portraits and stills had on the circulation of images of Diana Dors. As Marchant demonstrates, the role of production stills and portraits in maintaining the visibility of a star persona in popular culture is immeasurable. Joshua Gulam analyses the way in which Angelina Jolieâs acting career has intersected with her high-profile humanitarian campaigning, revealing a striking and instrumental interrelationship between the two. In the final chapter, on the rearticulation of Bruce Leeâs stardom by hip hop fans and vidders, Dorothy Wai-sim Lau makes it clear that starsâ images, and indeed their work, are digitally available to be accessed, reworked and recirculated on the internet to global fan audiences in ways that the stars and their caretakers or commercial exploiters have very little control over. Democratising the star image so that fans can rearticulate what Lee means for them, fan vids offer Lee reincarnated in contemporary media for fans who werenât alive when he died.
As Richard Dyer writes in Heavenly Bodies, âstar images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextualâ (2005, p. 3). A summary of the chapters in this book will, hopefully, be a preview of the coming attractions, but also inevitably asks more questions than it answers. Many other stars could be considered in light of the concepts we have included: Meg Ryan as a star imprisoned by her persona as Americaâs sweetheart; Catherine Deneuve as embodying a nationâs conception of femininity through the decades; and many of todayâs stars who are successfully marketing their own âbrandâ across multimedia platforms and in various commercial contexts. Countless other concepts remain to be explored, such as the memorialisation of certain stars in exhibitions and museums (such as Ava Gardner or James Stewart); the paralysing linkage of a star with one particular role (such as Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates); or the ambivalent co-dependence of star and director (Tim Burton and Johnny Depp). Our hope for this book is that it begins to suggest probable reasons for the endurance of some stars, the fading of others, and the ups and downs of several more, and paves the way for many more star studies works ...