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Hugh Grant’s career and persona have undergone a cultural, personal, and professional shift since the 2010s. During a period of semi-hiatus from acting, Grant became associated with politics as he campaigned for the protection of privacy and opposed Brexit. At the same time, his image has been reshaped through fatherhood, often depicted by the press as the reason behind his ‘comeback’. Since Florence Foster Jenkins in 2016, he has turned towards more ‘serious’ roles and distanced himself from his romcom persona. Focusing on his most recent roles in film and television, this article analyses the star’s performances and dissects the ambiguities and tensions at play in Grant’s ageing white ‘English’ upper-class image. Although inextricably associated with the romantic genre for years, I suggest that Grant’s acting style and persona are more in a state of perpetual flux, attached to the past yet increasingly layered with enjoyment for the craft as he ages. At the intersection of gender, ageing and star studies, this article shows how an ageing persona is (re-)established on screen, and how Grant’s characters within his films and television series might render a different image of white, privileged, English masculinity in contemporary times.

The film Siamo donne (We, the Women, 1953), written by Cesare Zavattini and divided into five episodes, represents an iconic case study to observe women of different ages and belonging to distinct generations. On the one hand, the first episode focuses on the ambitions of the young girls participating at the contest “Four stars and a starlet”; on the other hand, the following episodes, starring four celebrities playing the part of themselves, highlights the disillusions and regrets of mature women both in their private and professional life. Work, household, motherhood, and nostalgia are the main topics that interrelate with the portrayals of female aging provided by each episode. The film is a valuable opportunity to reflect upon the practices of cinema consumption and stardom in the 50s, especially from the contestants’ point of view. Throughout the analysis, we will also pay attention to voice over narration and the function of acousmatic voice as a memory device and expression of female subjectivity.

This contribution deals with one of the most famous films by Tinto Brass, La chiave (1983), played by Stefania Sandrelli. The film represented for Sandrelli, who was thirty-seven years old at the time of film’s release, a turning point in her artistic parable. The contribution intends to reconstruct a part of the reception of the film to highlight how some discursive operations have been spread around the aged image of the diva. In addition, the question of aging will be explored in relation to the case of a celebrity like Sandrelli, accompanied from the very beginning of her career by reflections and speeches that consider aging ahead of time. Ultimately, the case of La chiave, through Sandrelli, will give the opportunity to reflect on the forms of reception of the issue of aging, in relation to the sexualization of female performers, in a specific context of the history of the representation of sexuality in Italy.

This article discusses Camille Cottin’s star image, considering more specifically what was at stake in her 2019 performance in Mouche, the French remake of British tragicomedy TV series Fleabag created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The framework of this remake and the transposition of Cottin in the character played by Waller-Bridge offers a discussion on the representation of female sexuality and gender through the main character of Mouche and Fleabag. It argues that the nexus of Cottin’s gendered stardom both meets and transgresses the ideals of the cinematic type of the Parisienne, which may lead to think that Cottin was the perfect fit to be the French version of Fleabag. However, as Mouche, her persona gestures toward the projection of a female subjectivity that escapes inscription into the French cultural imagination and social practices. Drawing from theories of the abject and the female grotesque as a subversive strategy to challenge gendered expectations in Fleabag, this article sheds light on how effectively this is transposed to Cottin’s version of the character. It also considers how the strategy of breaking the fourth wall, which creates a personalised connection with the character of Fleabag, mimics the personalised and intimate connection to celebrities that social media now offers. The article suggests that Cottin’s on-screen persona competes with her star image, threatening to eradicate the space of spectatorial jouissance necessary for the processes of cinematic identification and intimate connection. Cet article se penche sur la persona de Camille Cottin, en s’intéressant notamment aux enjeux de sa performance dans Mouche (2019), le remake français de la série tragi-comique britannique Fleabag, créée par Phoebe Waller Bridge. Une comparaison entre les deux séries nous permet notamment d’explorer les représentations de genre qu’elles véhiculent. Le fait que l’image de Camille Cottin corresponde au type de la Parisienne tout en le transgressant laisse penser qu’elle est l’actrice parfaite pour incarner la version française du personnage de Fleabag. Cependant, en tant que Mouche, la star tend vers une féminité en décalage avec le contexte et l’imaginaire culturels français. Après avoir montré comment Fleabag utilise l’abject et le grotesque féminins pour subvertir les attentes genrées, l’article met en lumière les limites de la transposition de cette stratégie subversive au personnage incarné par Cottin. Enfin, il examine comment la rupture du quatrième mur – qui, en imitant le rapport intime avec les célébrités qu’offrent aujourd’hui les réseaux sociaux, crée un lien personnalisé entre le public et le personnage de Fleabag – pour suggérer que le personnage joué par Cottin rivalise ici avec son image de star, menaçant d’éradiquer l’espace de jouissance spectatorielle nécessaire au processus d’identification.

The article aims to critically explore and understand the ways both RuPaul’s star persona and its program, RuPaul’s Drag Race, are distributed in Italy, circulate across, and impact on the Italian television industry and media culture, it also aims to show how many forms of national mediation, professional negotiation and audience reception deeply modify, and re-shape the TV product. To tackle the manifold facets of this case, four aspects will be analyzed: (trans)national distribution; adaptation and dubbing; global/local stardom; reception and cultural impact. Over a decade, the Italian edition and distribution of the show have changed, together with the national media landscape and its audiences.

This essay addresses the intersection between the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok and Pinterest social media platforms and a contemporary religious leader/teacher who exploited them to rise from subalternity to the status of a deified celebrity. It examines his underprivileged disciples and followers and rival formal and informal levels, within Indian Sufi circles. Employing a combined perspective of ethnography, media studies and textual analysis, I discuss the transformations engendered by this social media celebrity and the impact of neo-liberalism on religious teacher–disciple (peeri–mureedi) relations. I show that this transformation involved a commodification of peeri–mureedi relations, leading to a neoliberal morphing of religious practices into marketable products. In so doing, I provide a critical reading of Mazzarella’s social media as “re-enlightened” or “inclusive capitalism” that gives voice, agency and new economic possibilities to capitalism’s most marginal subjects, who aspire to break the grip of what I term the “economies of despair”.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. This paper is part on an ongoing project that examines the development of British film stars and their fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned but fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actresses Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, and Pat Roc, and the British fan club for American actress Deanna Durbin. These resources, accessed from the Bill Douglas Archive (Exeter), the Steve Chibnall Collection (De Montfort) and the authors’ own collections, are contextualised with broader contemporaneous articles in newspapers, novels, film magazines and British and US industry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom. Combined, these ancillary materials raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtures and maintains stars’ unique brands, star capital and fan-following, and around these particular stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth, status and levity during a period of socio-cultural and industrial upheaval and austerity in Britain and its film industry. By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of these particular British film star personae and film star fan culture, this paper broadens our understanding of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, and offers valuable insights into star and fan labour and film fandom more generally, revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, of British star construction and dissemination, of studio control, reflexivity and of economic function, than has been commonly assumed.

This article focuses on Pola Negri, one of the most iconic stars of the silent era, and concentrates on her performance and image in the Hollywood film Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927). Assessing Negri's character within the wartime context of the plot, her screen presence and narrative function are analysed in relation to wartime anxiety, gender roles, and the role of the home front. Specifically, this article argues that Negri's exceptional display of anxiety, in contrast to the acting of her male co-protagonists, can be fruitfully understood as a distinctly “female”, empowering quality, aiding her role of main agent in the film. In the light of selected texts by Sigmund Freud, Charles Bachelard, and Lindsey Stonebridge, this article offers a close reading of Negri's performance, showing that Negri productively unblocks and mobilises the inherent anxiety of the film's time and place. Positioned in traditionally female locations, the home front and the domestic space, Negri acts upon the former by controlling the latter, enabling not only her own rescue, but also that of her menfolk: her soldier lover and, indirectly, the whole Austro-Hungarian army. This discussion is linked to the dramatic shift in Negri's image in Hotel Imperial, a shift which has traditionally been criticised as a weakening of her persona; this article instead argues that, far from being “tamed” by the shedding of her vamp connotations, Negri emerges as the film's strongest presence, gaining agency and power while explicitly rejecting patriarchal constructions of female sex-appeal. Publisher PDF

Indian fandom reconstituted as a more participatory culture with the emergence of online cyber communities in the late 1990s to early 2000s, a move accompanied by shifts in the Indian mediascape. With increasing synergy among film, television, and digital media, Bollywood stars were consequently remade as transmedia celebrities. Bollywood stars use digital media such as Twitter and Instagram for promotion and publicity, but such use has created a new type of Bollywood fan: the internet troll. As film personalities now actively engage with social media, incessantly tweeting and sharing pictures, the line has blurred between the reel and the real, the public and the private. Fans having perceived access to the private, off-screen personas of their film idols has further complicated both discourses of contemporary Bollywood stardom and fandom. Stars' and fan's engagement and interaction on social media reveals the so-called disrespectful troll to be not merely a more active participant but a fundamental reworking of the relationship between star and fan, which had been founded primarily on admiration and veneration. This reworking has provided a space for political mobilization in the Indian (online) public space offered by digital platforms and social networking sites.

Funder: University of Oxford, This article examines the institution of celebrity within academia. Academic celebrity has parallels with the celebrity seen in the wider world, though it is born of conditions unique to the fields of higher education and research and exhibits its own special characteristics. Whilst the scholarly prominence of academics can be based on more or less impersonal measures, especially citation statistics, academic celebrity, like popular celebrity, has emotional and subjective dimensions that call for non-subjective analysis. That challenge is met in this article by pointing to the cultural and institutional underpinnings of the phenomenon. In outlining some of academic celebrity’s defining features, we explore the critical difference between scholarly prominence, which is based on the perception of an academic’s excellence within their field, and celebrity, which incorporates adulation from colleagues and students. In reviewing the literature on the subject, we find models elaborating the ways in which modernity, in contrast to Elias’s court society (Rojek), or the world of aristocratic artistic patronage (Bourdieu), creates the conditions for the adulation of celebrities and the emergence of celebrity as an institution. We also find views critical of both the vulgarising effect of celebrity on literary and artistic taste (Coser), and its self-perpetuating character (Boorstin, Merton). Finally, we examine aspects of academic celebrity’s institutionalisation: the dynamic that drives the creation of new fields of specialisation within which academic celebrity is embedded, and the ‘managerial university’, which is said to generate and sustain it (Moran).

The interwar years – in contrast to the period of the partitions in Poland and the Polish People's Republic – was a time of an openness to queer sexual identities. Although queer issues within realistic plots were not present on Polish screens, filmmakers used other ways to smuggle in these themes, including through cross-dressing musical comedies, male homosocial communities, diva cult, camp and glamour. Some of these strategies were employed by Michal Waszynski, the director of the iconic Dybuk/The Dybbuk (1937), whose films and biography can be read as the prehistory of Polish queer cinema. This article explores not only queer codes that were used by the director to hide his non-heterosexual desires (queer identification with divas: Druga mlodośc/Second Youth [1938]), but also his biographical masquerade, which for many years was obscured. The films and biography of Waszynski prove that queer issues were present in interwar Polish culture.

The roles of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in microbial processes and nutrient cycles depend on its composition, which requires detailed measurements and analyses. We introduce a package for R, called staRdom (&ldquo, spectroscopic analysis of DOM in R&rdquo, ), to analyze DOM spectroscopic data (absorbance and fluorescence), which is key to deliver fast insight into DOM composition of many samples. staRdom provides functions that standardize data preparation and analysis of spectroscopic data and are inspired by practical work. The user can perform blank subtraction, dilution correction, Raman normalization, scatter removal and interpolation, and fluorescence normalization. The software performs parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) of excitation&ndash, emission matrices (EEMs), including peak picking of EEMs, and calculates fluorescence indices, absorbance indices, and absorbance slope indices from EEMs and absorbance spectra. A comparison between PARAFAC solutions by staRdom in R compared with drEEM in MATLAB showed nearly identical solutions for most datasets, although different convergence criteria are needed to obtain similar results and interpolation of missing data is important when working with staRdom. In conclusion, staRdom offers the opportunity for standardized multivariate decomposition of spectroscopic data without requiring software licensing fees and presuming only basic R knowledge.

Dans cette réflexion sur la perception culturelle et politique des « images intolérables » nous questionnons l’argument selon lequel l’écriture optique de l’histoire forgée par les « photographies violentes » sombrerait dans une forme de démotivation psychologique et un dédain moral qui éloignent le public du photojournalisme. Notre attention à l’égard de l’ambiguïté inhérente de l’image photographique, de la dialectique intrinsèque et du cœur « brûlant » de celle-ci, nous permet de raffiner la notion de « choc » ancré dans cette image. Comme toute trace, la photographie est portée par sa propre destruction. Mais ce que la photographie capture est aussi une machine d’indétermination dans laquelle l’oscillation et l’incertitude entre le « réel » et le spectral, entre le vivant et le non-vivant, ne semble jamais finir. À travers une étude du travail de Sebastião Salgado, parmi d’autres, notre réflexion, portée par Susan Sontag et Serge Margel, montre qu’il y a un « glamour de l’horreur » dans lequel le trauma est le nom de la structure déconstructive qui est lovée au cœur des machinations photographiques et cinématographiques. In this reflection about today’s cultural and political perception of “intolerable images”, we question the argument that the optical writing of history provided by “violent photographs” would sink in a form of psychological demotivation and moral disdain that turns the public away from photojournalism. Focusing on the photographic image’s inherent ambiguity, on its intrinsic dialectic as well as its own “burning” core, allows us to address the shock contained in images per se. Like any trace, photography carries out its own destruction. But what the photograph captures is also a machinery of indetermination in which the oscillation and uncertainty between the “real” and the spectral, the living and the non-living, never seems to end. While studying Sebastião Salgado’s work among others, our reflection on Susan Sontag and Serge Margel shows that there is a “glamour of horror” in which trauma is the name of a deconstructive structure that lies at the core of the photographic and cinematic machinations.

This work will explore some of the broader implications of celebrity group selfies, through the example of Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded group shot, taken during the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony, Joan Collins’ 2014 Prince’s Trust Award selfie, just days after, and Collins’ subsequent ‘view from the other side’ tweet; exploring notions of authenticity, performance, intimacy, self-promotion, public visibility, identification, imitation, vicarious consumption and audience participation. Engaging with existing work upon celebrity tweeters, Twitter and other online fandom, photographic theory, star studies and, in particular, Bourdieu’s theories surrounding cultural capital, taste formation, and cultural distinctions, this work not only explores some of the reasons behind the frequently negative judgements of celebrity group selfies, but also seeks to identify some of the very real social functions and more personal gratifications, both for celebrity and fan, that the celebrity group selfie, as a communication and a self-promotional tool, may actually satisfy. More specifically, it is this paper’s contention that selfies offer an ostensibly unmediated, accessible and virtually instantaneous means of articulating and disseminating a coherent, identifiable, aspirational (yet bizarrely, also, seemingly ‘ordinary’) and eminently marketable star image, via a popular and up-to-date medium. With celebrity group selfies this is also the case, but here the photographer subject presents an image of themselves to the world, in relation to a specific group of peers (who themselves also function as signifiers and commodities); perpetuating the notion of a pantheon of star ‘gods’ and the myth of a coherent celebrity community; reinforcing the divide between ‘famouses’ and ‘normals’ and participants and observers; prompting an exponential rise in fan/public interest as more stars enter the equation and allowing the celebrity participants within the image to either borrow some of the greater ‘worth’, ‘status’ or cultural capital of other, more eminent, celebrity subjects also pictured or alternatively, lend their superior cultural capital to less successful celebrities within the image. As such, this work seeks to move beyond a hasty dismissal of such images, their subjects, and their audiences and instead, hypothesise a coherent set of reasons why the most-photographed individuals on the planet (not just film stars, but heads of state and religious leaders) might feasibly choose to create, appear in and/or disseminate such images (or, indeed, decline to participate as did Prince Charles in Joan Collins’ group shot) and why the public may find these images of such interest.

Roach proposes an inventive reconsideration of the film’s two stars, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart that is premised fervently on post-structural deconstructions of masculinity and the politics of the body. Through gestural analyses and close attention to the ways in which both men occupy the filmic space, the article establishes a rigorous interpretation of Richard Dyer’s theories of stardom that is premised upon relational aesthetics: of not only its leads’ interactions with each other, but also an ethic of genre-based intertextuality

This article argues that Rena Owen’s star persona has been constrained, and ultimately undermined, by essentialist definitions of her status as Māori on the part of print media, in particular women’s magazines, in response to her role as Beth in Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994), a role that thrust her into the international limelight. These ancillary texts served to emphasise two stereotypes, positioning her either in relation to the traditional Pacific Island female type of the ‘dusky maiden’ or focusing on her criminal past and current scandalous behaviour. These representations of the actress detracted from her considerable talents and were undoubtedly a factor in determining a career trajectory that failed to fulfil its early promise. The scandal mongering of the tabloids expressed the uneasiness with which Aotearoa/New Zealand viewed public personalities that embraced a cultural past that included both Māori and European identities. Unlike the international press, which compared Owen’s performance to that of a range of film stars noted for their dramatic and charismatic capacities and presence, from Bette Davis to Anna Magnani, the New Zealand press portrayed her as ‘Beth’—as a social victim rather than an accomplished thespian.

Arturo de Córdova was an international Mexican film star that managed to participate in Mexico, Argentina and Spain cinemas. His career was possible in a transnational cinema that achieved to reach to a wide Spanish speaking audience. In these films, he developed a character that went from the romantic male star to the mature seducer that will have an important role in the post-war middleclass society. He will act as a medium character between active businessman and their wives that will not admit the daily housework and be kept in a private sphere as norm. The analysis will be focussed on two plays that were adapted to the cinema. These plays were written by two Spanish authors; Alejandro Casona in Mexico and Alfonso Paso in Spain, and they were shot in these countries as Las tres perfectas casadas (1952) and Cena de matrimonios (1962). The dramatic similarity in their approach to the conflict between men and women allow us to present the critical view elaborated against the conventions that gave structure to marriage in this society. The fact that De Córdova played the main role points out the Hispanic shared culture about genre matters.Arturo de Córdova fue una estrella internacional mexicana que participó en las cinematografías de México, Argentina y España. Su carrera fue posible en un cine transnacional que logró llegar a un amplio público hispanoparlantes. En estas películas, desarrolló un personaje que fue de la estrella romántica al seductor marido que tendrá un papel importante en la sociedad de clase media, posterior a la Guerra Mundial. Actuará como un personaje de mediación entre los activos hombres de negocios y sus mujeres, que no admitirán el trabajo de casa y quedarse en un espacio privado como norma. El análisis del artículo se concentrará en dos obras teatrales que fueron llevadas al cine. Esas obras fueron escritas por dos autores españoles: Alejandro Casona en México y Alfonso de Paso en España, y fueron filmadas en estos países como Las tres perfectas casadas (1952) y Cena de matrimonios (1962). La similitud dramática en su aproximación al conflicto entre hombres y mujeres permite presentar la visión crítica elaborada contra las convenciones que daban estructura al matrimonio en esta sociedad. El hecho de que De Córdova jugara un papel protagonista en estas obras apunta a la cultura hispana compartida acerca de las cuestiones de género.