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This article offers a new perspective on the much-discussed phenomenon of the 'Bond girl' through an exploration of photographic artwork produced in later life by two notable Bond girls: the two 'golden girls' of Goldfinger (1964), Margaret Nolan, who appeared in the film's credit sequence, and Shirley Eaton, who played the character who suffers skin suffocation by being painted gold. It is a remarkable coincidence that both women turned to photographic artwork as a way of reflecting back on their careers and on their youthful positioning as sex symbols, exemplified by their highly publicised appearances in Goldfinger. This article places their 1960s iconicity into dialogue with their retrospective, reflective artwork which is by turns critical, celebratory and ambivalent about their past lives as Bond girls. Nolan's feminist-inflected photo-collages render her previous glamorous image uncanny through unsettling and subversive juxtapositions whereas Eaton's digital remixing of old images alongside contemporary self-portraiture occupy the territory of star glamour more comfortably but extend it by showing the golden girl as older woman. Nolan and Eaton's artwork provides valuable insights into the experiential dimensions of having been a Bond girl, with their creative response through art presenting certain complexities and nuances that written or spoken accounts might not access in quite the same way. In that respect, this article, alongside its specific insights into Bond girls, demonstrates the value for researchers in engaging with such material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst share a long-standing collaboration that has lasted from Dunst's adolescence onwards and into mature womanhood. As a former child star, Dunst has grown up in front of Coppola's camera and has come to be closely associated with the director's rarefied and highly aestheticised cinematic world. I have argued elsewhere that a cardinal and abiding concern of Coppola's oeuvre is how images come to be collectively and culturally understood; moreover, Coppola is especially concerned with how the (en)gendering of an image can either open up or foreclose sites of contestation. Coppola is positioned in contrast to readings of her work as strictly postfeminist. I argue that Coppola's work is postfeminist to the extent that it exhibits an indebtedness to, in particular, second wave feminism, but I also contend that Coppola is concerned with critiquing the mores and norms of postfeminism from a resolutely feminist perspective

Discussions of the exilic body in Hollywood cinema have tended to focus on the personal trajectories of émigré actors in the context of the broader history of the industry in which they achieved star status. Significant work has been done in particular on the fate of European women stars in Hollywood but what has been rarely addressed, however, is the way in which Hollywood films imagine the exilic experience via the narratives built around specific stars. This article focuses on Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the dominant stars of the 1980s–1990s, whose foreignness, accent and body are used in a remarkably consistent set of aesthetic, generic and narrative practices. The article uses Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of sonority to argue that the sonorous presence of the foreign other in the “host” space produces a new space; it produces the space of the host anew as one in which the foreign other is present despite the discursive denial of the possibility of that presence whilst at the same time producing a new self as distinct from the self before displacement. The article's aim is to highlight the ways in which Hollywood films produce and reproduce foreignness as an impossibility, a presence that cannot be. The use of the foreign star, I argue, is to perform the permeability of the boundary between outside and inside, while also policing it.

The article demonstrates how the British drama film "My Week With Marilyn" offers insights into the way in which British actress Vivien Leigh is popularly perceived as neurotic and unstable. It analyzes Leigh's image and career which make it possible to construct a counternarrative of the actress' negative depiction in the film. It also examines the role of aging in the careers of Leigh and actress Julia Ormond, who played Leigh in the film.

Danny Dyer is one of Britain's most prolific stars, with a career spanning both critically acclaimed and critically derided material, the latter exemplified by his work in exploitation movies. This article investigates Dyer's film stardom, considering some of the central debates surrounding his status as an actor. Central to the discussion is the significance of Dyer within the contemporary cultural landscapes of gender and class, and the various complexities and contradictions that circulate around his persona. The article analyses Dyer's stardom in the wake of his role in the cult exploitation movie that consolidated his subsequent 'hard man' typecasting, The Football Factory (2004), and considers how the marketing of the majority of his subsequent films has been instrumental in perpetuating a particular construction of his stardom which, in turn, informs his reception by the critics. The article traces connections between Dyer's popularity and recurrent critical derision aimed at him as an actor lacking artistic integrity and genuine talent. It contends that the politics of both Dyer's star construction and his critical reception are linked to the renewed legitimacy of class hatred in British society, represented by media discourses surrounding the 'chav', which appositely reflects his 'low' cultural status as a 'straight-to-DVD' actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the cycle of British performers in contemporary American television drama and what is at stake in their adoption of a US accent. British actors have been increasingly heralded for their ability to adopt credible foreign accents, marking a negotiation of 'Britishness' and assumed vocal 'foreignness'. By examining several pilot episodes of contemporary US dramas, this article poses the hybrid voice of the 'accented American' as a privileged and self-reflexive form of sonic spectacle. This is a voice narratively 'othered' to reinforce the screen presence of the British actor-as-American, soliciting spectators' attention to their extra-textual identities as non-natives, while paradoxically consecrating 'Britishness' through the individual actor's assured command of American language. The article concludes by scrutinising the post-9/11 captive narrative of successful US drama Homeland (Showtime, 2011-). Through its themes of dubious patriotic allegiance, Homeland inscribes the cultural discourses surrounding Damian Lewis's starring role and falsified Americanness. The series also operates as a valuable commentary upon the wider proliferation of British talent across American television, revealing the ways in which such small-screen dramas are helping to regenerate prior conceptions of British stardom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, although the subject of film sound is a developing field of interest in film studies, the voice, despite its centrality to issues of performance and stardom, remains an under-examined subject within the discipline. It considers some existing work on the topic and proposed methodologies for the analysis of voice and performance. The work of James Mason is used as a case study, offering an overview of his career and a discussion of the changes in his star persona and performance style as he moved from star to character actor. Consideration is given to the ways in which Mason's distinctive voice became the defining aspect of his star persona and a subject for impersonation. Critical responses to his vocal style throughout his career are examined and sequences from three Mason films, The Pumpkin Eater (1964), Fanny by Gaslight (1944) and The Upturned Glass (1947) are analysed in order to explore Mason's use of voice and gesture in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the beginnings of the British actor Roddy McDowall's career as a child star in Hollywood. Following his relocation to the United States in October 1940 and signing a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, McDowall quickly became one of Hollywood's most popular juvenile actors. For the duration of the Second World War, McDowall's star image was indissoluble from his status as a war guest: he was 'a British evacuee star'. McDowall thus became an unofficial ambassador for the British nation, much like his fellow evacuees, who were widely recognised for their work improving Anglo-American relations. In the management of McDowall's image, and in his screen performances, there is a discernible effort to substantiate certain attitudes about the character and attributes of the British nation but also to challenge certain prejudices about English sissy boys. McDowall's star text was carefully managed so that the image of the actor presented by the media and the fictional characters he played on screen congealed in a productive way to inspire among American audiences specific sentiments about the British and America's relationship with the British nation during wartime. Analysing the representation of McDowall in American film magazines during the early 1940s, as well as his performances in three war-themed productions - Confirm or Deny (1941), On the Sunny Side (1942) and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) - I explore the ways McDowall's star text functioned in its geopolitical and bio-political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]