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«What would Sophia Loren do?» is a question that Nancy Kulik, daughter of Italian immigrants, asked herself many times in her life. Even at a young age, Loren has served her not only as a compass for important choices, but also to create an emotional connection with her Italian heritage. Through its personal approach, the documentary «What would Sophia Loren do?» makes us understand how Kulik is thus representative of a nostalgic migrant’s view of the Italian-American diaspora. This short cinematic homage gives the opportunity to reflect on Sophia Loren’s cult of the star from the perspective of the “transatlantic-gaze” (Carolan McDonald, 2014), gender and time-image (Deleuze, 1991), and not least, “italianità” and “americanità” against the backdrop of the Italian-American migration experience.

Stephen Chow is one of the most commercially and critically successful comedians in Hong Kong’s film history, but his popularity and legacy in other East Asian countries remains understudied. As the South Korean media nowadays still often mention him in their comedy discourse, this article seeks to shed light on Stephen Chow’s stardom, or more precisely, memories of his stardom in South Korea, which endured through the 1990s until the early 2000s. It analyses the YouTube channel B-rated Review, a highly active and popular Korean vidding community for Stephen Chow, on which amateur videos that remix and review his twentieth-century movies are published and discussed. Through the lens of participatory culture and participatory memory, this study examines the discursive strategies employed by the vid creator and commenters to collaboratively define, translate, and interpret Chow’s sense of humor in the South Korean context. It discusses how they borrow the Korean neologism byeongmat as a foilto argue for the sociocultural relevance of Stephen Chow, and how they use his comedies as a device to evoke nostalgia for their lived experiences. This research, arguing that vidding is a participatory process of not only cultural production but also cultural memory making, demonstrates the active role of user-generated activities in (re)localizing international stardom across time. It seeks to contribute to the belatedly expanding body of literature on Stephen Chow from an intercultural, digital, and audience-centered perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shrayana Bhattacharya's book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence is about women in contemporary India, how their gendered existence is shaped by patriarchal structures of exclusion and censure, and how women often use fandom (for Shah Rukh Khan) to build communities of solidarity and togetherness. This review article uses the book's analysis to move the discussion of stardom beyond the star's romantic appeal to women, to contextualize Shah Rukh Khan's appeal in the broader milieu of precarity, alienation and heightened misogyny produced by neoliberalism. Ironically, the very culture that is responsible for the misery of women, has also created an unstable public that is putting real, violent limits to the phenomenon of stardom itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the career of Eugeniusz Bodo who was the greatest Polish male movie star of the interwar period, examines the character he created on screen and its connection to Bodo's off-screen persona. It also examines his position in Polish cinema after his death, especially during the period following the fall of state socialism, what is described here as 'poststardom'. It argues that Bodo owed his success to two principal factors. One of them was the conducive circumstances in the Polish film and entertainment industry and his ability to exploit them to the full. Another factor was the match between his artistic persona and certain traits of Polish national character and, especially, the fit between the ideas Bodo embodied in some of his films and the image Poland tried to create during the same period. It also claims that after 1989 Bodo's appeal was augmented because the details of his death, revealed in this period, rendered him the perfect tragic artist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Disney Princesses were established as a marketing brand in 2000, they have become a famous 'phenomenon' that has been commercially successful, popular, and adored, but one that has also received much criticism from scholars and consumers alike. Although audience research has gained increasing recognition in recent years, this field's attention has focused mainly on the 'West', neglecting Eastern European—including child—audiences. Moreover, while there are several scholarly examinations of Disney Princess films, these studies mainly employ textual analysis (Escalada-Cordova 2018; Whelan 2014; Wilde 2014) rather than conducting empirical research. Instead of reading for the audiences and making assumptions about how they interpret fame from a media text, in this case Disney Princesses, it is therefore crucial to ask audience members themselves, as Sonia Livingstone observes, 'it is established that audiences are plural in their decodings, that their cultural context matters, and that they often disagree with textual analyses' (2008, p. 4). By drawing upon diverse scholarly works within the field of celebrity studies as well as undertaking an audience study with Eastern European—specifically Hungarian—tweens, the objective of this article is twofold. On the one hand, this paper argues that animated characters are indeed entitled to have a fame status. It does so by deploying theorisations that distinguish between heroes and celebrities (North, Bland, and Ellis 2005), celebrities and stars (G. Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 2000), and differentiate among animated characters considered as 'celeactors' (Rojek 2001), or as stars (Ellis 2007; McGowan 2018; 2019). On the other hand, through the analysis of audiences' diverse perceptions of fame, illustrated by Hungarian tweens' understanding of Disney Princesses—an enormous global media phenomenon—this article provides a key case study for the aforementioned argument while highlighting the features of celebrity culture that are specific to Hungary. Taking into account Hungarian tweens' approaches towards Disney Princesses, while considering that Disney is claimed to have 'immense power over childhood culture' (Garofalo 2013) and that '[t]he celebrity is simultaneously a construction of the dominant culture and a construction of the subordinate audiences of the culture' (Marshall 2014, p. 48), this paper starts revealing the diverse ways in which different cultures conceptualise celebrity notions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the memefication of Keanu Reeves in 21st century digital remix culture, exploring the cultural investment in an idea of him as being 'too good for this world'. To reflect on how Reeves, in the middle-aged period of his stardom, has become a receptacle for good will and positive affect, the essay situates his internet stardom in relation to the rise of the 'sad man' meme. Exploring the networked affective processes through which Reeves' star persona has taken on recharged cultural significance, the essay argues that the surge of internet memes surrounding the actor work to articulate cultural anxieties and desires surrounding male stardom in a post-cinematic, #MeToo era. While the essay explores how the cultural adulation of Reeves wards off deep-seated concerns about male stardom as a central site for the reproduction of toxic masculinity, it concludes by sounding a cautionary note about the risks and limitations of such worship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Zhao Dan's (1915–1980) career in film after 1949 to investigate a specific type of stardom unique to Mao Zedong's China (1949–1976). We argue that this new stardom was similar to what conventionally defines stardom, but with an added political dimension: Zhao Dan's acquisition of high political standing in the People's Republic of China (PRC). To arrive at a fuller understanding of the state–artist relationship in the PRC, this article challenges the paradigm of accommodation and resistance between the tyrannical state and subordinated artists, which presupposes a subjectivity or selfhood on the part of artists that pre-existed and was maintained against the intrusive hegemonic ideologies of the state. Instead, we underscore that the making of Zhao Dan's subjectivity in the PRC—his subjectivity-in-stardom in this case—was a dynamic process, a "becoming." Zhao Dan's checkered career indicates that he not only acclimated himself to the ever-changing political atmosphere of Mao-era China but also sought to benefit from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Baxter, Charles Boyer: The French Lover (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,2021), pp. vii-254, ISBN978-0813155524 (hb), $33

In 1970, more than twenty-five years after her film debut, Lauren Bacall made a dramatic comeback as Margo Channing in Applause (1970–73), the Broadway musical remake of All About Eve (1950). Defying critical skepticism and popular ageism and confronting the public's enduring memory of her screen image, she achieved new heights in her lucrative and award-winning turn onstage. This essay examines the show's production history from the vantage point of Bacall's own archives, placing personal writing in conversation with press coverage to trace how the star leveraged theatrical success to reinvent herself as a "living legend" of Old Hollywood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the way that early female film stars from both Britain and America are portrayed in the popular magazine The Red Letter. It argues that even in 1920, there was already a common pattern to notions of female stardom that essentially revolved around ideas of class, and that rather than being newly minted, these notions of the female star were in several ways appropriated from the music hall, a form of entertainment that was firmly established by this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some of the key methodological challenges emerging from the AHRC project Reframing Vivien Leigh: Stardom, Archives and Access, led by PI Dr. Lisa Stead at the University of Exeter. This twenty-month project examined how the legacies of screen star Vivien Leigh are archived and curated by a range of public institutions in the South West of England, taking audiences behind the scenes of local archives and museums. The paper reflects on how researching within rural heritage centres and volunteer run archives encourages the introduction of new voices and new case studies within women’s film history, by encompassing the archival labour of a network of volunteers, amateurs and professionals within a broader heritage sector whose historical actions and choices produce alternative kinds of women’s film history. It reflects in turn on the challenge involved in finding new ways to present these histories in interactive, digital and physical forms for audiences beyond the academy and to make meaningful impact from this kind of research.

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.

A world-renowned star since Titanic (James Cameron, 1996), choosing to later star in independent auteur films such as Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999), Kate Winslet made a new turning point in her career by playing the heroine of Mildred Pierce, a mini-series directed by Todd Haynes for cable channel HBO in 2011. Our article seeks to shed light on the aesthetic and cultural issues surrounding this transition from the star of the cinema screen to that of television. In particular, it tries to show how the actress’ persona has nourished the character’s interpretation, but also how the latter renews it and reflects Winslet’s conflictual relationship with celebrity and stardom.

The article makes an attempt to create a typology of movie characters played by Marilyn Monroe. Her film roles are classic examples of typecasting. Since Monroe was a type of a sexy blonde, that was what she played in her movies. Whether it was a comedy or drama, her sexiness defined the entire character. However, the attributes of the sex bomb Marilyn combined with other features: of an innocent child, a lost and helpless girl, a sensitive and tender woman. These three types of characters: a child-woman, a female buddy, and a woman-partner, make up the full picture of Monroe's femininity with which viewers interact during the cinematic mystery and which create an artistic, social and cultural phenomenon called 'Marilyn Monroe.'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an examination of the posthumous cultification process in relation to the evolutionary trajectory of the star image of the late Sharon Tate. While Tate was known primarily for her beauty throughout the 1960s, the events of her death at the hands of the Manson Family in the summer of 1969 caused the rising star's image to be drastically altered to solely that of a cult victim. Considering Jean Baudrillard's theory of the hyperreal, this article explores how the reproduced images of Tate across the media phenomena of Mansonsploitation have subconsciously substituted the reality of Tate and her accomplishments within the minds of modern audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the "Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood" film by Quentin Tarantino. It discusses that definition of the director-as-DJ which is explored by Michael Rennett, who argues that some contemporary filmmakers have ‘become the moviemaking [representatives] of hip hop society;' and Rennett observes that such quotations can be made in a multitude of ways, including soundtrack, production design and costume (2012: 395–96).

Actress Mary Pickford is perhaps best remembered for her silent-screen persona “Little Mary.” But there was another important aspect to her Hollywood career that is frequently overlooked today: Pickford’s rise to power and fame corresponded with the era of the “New Woman” in U.S. society. This article explores the mediated construction of new womanhood as communicated through the coverage of Pickford’s career between 1918 and 1921 in the pages of the fan magazine Photoplay. It demonstrates how Photoplay used coverage of Pickford to promote the ideal of new womanhood until 1919, when she became the most powerful woman in American moviemaking by co-founding United Artists with three men. After that, at the start of the Roaring Twenties, the magazine sought to contain new womanhood by presenting Pickford almost exclusively as a child, without continuing to acknowledge her abilities as a savvy movie mogul and grown woman as it had regularly done in the past—until significant changes in her personal life required another noteworthy shift in the magazine’s coverage patterns of this star.

In one of the latest additions to the BFI Film Stars series, Paul McDonald turns the spotlight on the filmic and extrafilmic career of contemporary male performer George Clooney (1961–). Edited by Martin Shingler and Susan Smith, the series launched in 2012 with the former’s general guide, Star Studies: A Critical Guide, and the latter’s individual star study Elizabeth Taylor. The editors state an overarching aim of producing one hundred titles over a twenty-year period, each profiling a separate performer from Western and world cinema.

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”.

This article re-examines Cary Grant’s star persona arguing that the importance of his Bristolian identity has been under-appreciated. Through a detailed discussion of attempts to promote his Bristolian roots including the biennial Cary Comes Home Festival (established 2014), the article argues that these activities have encouraged a re-evaluation of Cary Grant’s star identity, increased understanding of his importance to Bristol’s screen heritage, and helped promote film tourism to the city. The article outlines the history and development of the festival, critically reflecting on the curatorial practices that underpinned them. It is informed by three main interlinked theoretical areas: star studies; the literature on fan practices of cinematic tourism and pilgrimage, and festival studies. It analyses the ways in which expanded cinema programming provides opportunities for decentering the understanding of Grant’s persona as a Hollywood star, by exploring the festival’s programming of immersive cinematic experiences in locations that were significant to his Bristolian identity. The article also examines the impact of the festival’s role in relocating Grant within Bristol, the ways in which it has enhanced the city’s sense of its cinematic heritage – including achieving UNESCO City of Film status in October 2017 – and the ways in which Bristol has become a living archive through which and in which Cary Grant’s star persona is constructed and circulates, which has helped promote film tourism to the city today.

Mark Glancy, Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) and Scott Eyman, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

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.

In the 1950s Anna Magnani played an important role in the internationalization of European stardom, becoming the first Italian actress to win an Oscar in 1955. She was 46 years old and had reached international success at the age of 37. Related to the aesthetical concerns of Italian Neorealism, and considered a pioneer in modern representation of female psychology and desire, Magnani’s case puts into question the idea that, according to Edgar Morin, grace, beauty and youth are sine qua non conditions to become a star. Between 1955 and 1960 the actress participated in three Hollywood movies along with mentoring figures such as Tennessee Williams and producer Hal B. Wallis: The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955), Wild is the Wind (George Cukor, 1957) and The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet, 1959). Magnani’s Hollywood films suggest a kind of tailor-made melodrama, concerned in documenting her unique performative style while Hollywood experiences a great renewal of dramatic patterns and acting models. These titles also share a common subject: a passionate mature woman in crisis who, attracted to a younger man, experiences a personal rebirth closely linked to the raise of her sexuality and desire. Through the analysis of these films and how they relate to Magnani’s stardom construction in the Italian postwar, this article investigates the role of the actress in the transit of the 1950s to the 1960s. A season of great transformations in world cinema in which Hollywood, apparently interested in documenting Magnani’s uniqueness, has probably ended up discussing some of the greatest taboos in classic movies: aging over women’s bodies, erotism between mature femininity and young masculinity, or the experience of sex and passion according to a female character who remains the subject of its own desire.

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.

Anchored on the figure of the young Malayalam film actor Rahman and his mercurial rise to popularity in the 1980s, this paper argues that 'youth' bears within itself the desire to transcend the gender barrier and fashion a shared sensibility and subjectivity that reaches its peak in the neoliberal moment, thus signifying a new metrosexual, even androgynous, subject who is able to speak for the aspiring global citizens of the region. Rahman signifies a break in the traditional, hegemonic imagination of South Indian masculinity that is rooted in the region, and instead stands for the new configuration of cosmopolitan youth that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of the migration to the Persian Gulf and the inflow of money and consumer goods from there – a category of youth whose self-fashioning was inflected in a significant way by their consumption practices. Certain representational techniques also resulted in a queering or androgyny of the youthful figure that he personified, suggesting the liminality of gendered identity in youth. Apart from textual analyses of a selection of his films, I also draw on popular reportage around his stardom in the form of news reports and gossip columns published in the leading Malayalam film weekly, Naana, in the 1980s. While the former helps to outline the representational function of Rahman's body in film narratives, the latter supplements this with data on how the ways in which his figure was imagined and received, both within the industry and among fans, contributes to fashioning a new youth subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of British film stars and fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actors Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, Patricia Roc and Richard Attenborough and the British fan club for American actor Deanna Durbin. These previously unexamined resources are contextualised with contemporaneous newspaper articles, novels, film magazines andindustry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom. Combined, these artefacts raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtured and maintained stars' brands, star capital and fan followings and around stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth and status during a period of socio-cultural and film industry upheaval in austerity Britain. By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of British film star personae and film star fan culture at its zenith, this paper broadens understandings of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, and offers valuable new insights into film fandom more generally, revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, British star construction and dissemination, studio control, reflexivity and economic function, than commonly assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing 'mash-ups' playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of 'take two' cinephilia, and the 'technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images' in an era of 'the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling' (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these 'take two' Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as 'puzzling' cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood's many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a 'take two' undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, 'body narratives' and 'second skins' (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, the cable television network Lifetime broadcast the biopic Whitney, depicting the troubled life of the late superstar singer Whitney Houston. Whitney is the first film by director Angela Bassett, who, as actress, famously portraited Tina Turner in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It (Brian Gibson, 1993). In this article, I will first position Whitney within a larger tradition of the Hollywood biopic by making a comparison to earlier important biopics about black female entertainers, namely Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972), starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday, and What’s Love Got to Do with It. Second, I will discuss how the narratives of these three biopics tend to reduce their female subjects to victims, emphasizing the tragedy in their personal lives, while assigning much more agency to the male partners of these black female entertainers. Third and finally, I will analyze the final scenes of these three biopics in detail, as each presents a grand finale musical performance that seems to resolve the contradictions of the triumph and tragedy in their subject’s lives, yet in significantly different ways.