1 Reinvigorating and Reinventing Stardom Symposium Saturday 2

Reinvigorating and Reinventing Stardom Symposium Saturday 2 November 2019 Millburn House, University of Warwick 9:15-9:45 Registration and Tea and Coffee (A0.26) 9:45-11:15 Welcome and keynote from Sarah Thomas, University of Liverpool, ''’Smart' Stardom: avatars, agency and assets” (A0.28) Chair: Eleonora Sammartino, Imperial College London 11:15-11:30 Comfort Break 11:30-13:00 Panels A and B Panel A: Local/Regional Stardom (A1.25) Chair: Michael Williams, University of Southampton Hollie Price, University of Sussex, ‘Local stars in new film’: Jill Craigie and Postwar British Stardom In the ‘mid-1940s, Jill Craigie planned to make a film about the suffragette movement with an all-star cast. Detailing these plans, she suggested that ‘the project might be acceptable if it were presented as “a starring vehicle”. Indulging in a ridiculous fantasy, as I often did at the time, I considered which of the most famous film stars might be suitable for the leading parts’. This paper situates and explores Craigie’s reinvigoration of star discourses as part of a postwar climate in which British film stars were becoming increasingly visible, and, as part of which, Craigie herself had been promoted by Rank’s staged publicity photos and magazine articles about her home life. The Way We Live (1946), Craigie’s film about postwar reconstruction in Plymouth, and Blue Scar (1949), her film about miners in South Wales, were both shaped by the deployment of popular ideas of film stardom. For instance, during the making of Blue Scar in Port Talbot, screen tests for miners and local young women were promoted in regional newspapers as ‘star-hunts’. Likewise, publicity for The Way We Live detailed how Craigie would encourage non-professional actors by comparing them with popular stars like Robert Donat, her ‘discovery’ of 17 year-old Patsy Scantlebury jitterbugging in Plymouth – who went on to be signed to Rank, and her casting of a whole family of ‘real Plymothians’ with their own experiences of wartime destruction. By exploring archival evidence of the promotion and publicity for these two films, I highlight how Craigie’s participatory film projects with regional communities reinvented popular narratives of stardom for local audiences, thus illuminating these films’ blurring of boundaries between stardom and local celebrity. 1 Ellen Wright, De Montfort University and Phyll Smith, University of East Anglia, Star Products, Star Capital, Fan Markets: Examining 1940s British film stardom through fan club publications This paper is part on an ongoing project that considers visible and ‘invisible’ star labour, in a context long before social media celebrity culture and the neo-liberal focus upon one’s self-improvement and building yourself a brand. Considered here is 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, their what we term ‘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, but more pertinently in today’s celebrity culture age, offers valuable insights into star and fan labour and film fandom more generally as well as 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. Lisa Stead, University of Exeter, Scarlett O’Hara in the South West: curatorial histories and localised star legacies Turning attention from the screen and towards the archive, this paper explores the way that global star icons make meaning in distinctly regional spaces through the archiving of material fragments of their working and off-screen lives. The paper focuses on a case study of transatlantic classical film and theatre star Vivien Leigh, drawing together methodological approaches from archive and museum studies and feminist film historiography to interrogate Leigh’s connection to the South West of England. Her association with the region was established in the 2 early stages of her career through her first marriage to barrister Leigh Holman, whose sister Dorothy established a museum in the small estuary town of Topsham. A curatorial relationship between Dorothy and collector Freda Wills at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter soon resulted in the swapping and presentation of Leigh artefacts at both locations, originally donated to Dorothy and to RAMM after Leigh’s death by her daughter Suzanne Farrington across the 1960s and 70s. Drawing upon original interviews with current curators and hands-on work in both collections, the paper traces the working practices of Holman and Wills to explore how a star like Leigh is reclaimed and reframed as a ‘local’ star in these contexts. It considers the curatorial history of items such as a nightdress worn by Leigh in Gone with the Wind, for example, as they passed through the hands of these collectors. In doing so, I aim to illustrate how a material remnant of star performance becomes the occasion for the creation of a complex network of meaning between generations of women; a network centred on a sustained interplay between distinctly gendered discourses on local identity and Hollywood glamour that extends into the present day. Panel B: National Icons (A0.28) Chair: Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Lisa Duffy, Queen Mary, University of London, Walt Disney: Studio Head as Star The classical era studio system produced a heaven’s worth of film stars whose personas were carefully controlled by the studio to which they were contracted. However, one studio, Walt Disney Productions, eschewed this setup, choosing instead to make its namesake studio head its major star. Walt Disney imbued his company with his own brand of folksy Americana authenticity, causing all studio projects to be read through his star image. This is true over the trajectory of Disney’s career but becomes particularly pronounced in his use of television. Television creates ‘intimacy, immediacy, and spontaneity’ (Murray 2005), making authenticity seem more accessible, something Disney used to establish a familial presence in pop culture. First appearing on television in 1950 in One Hour in Wonderland, and eventually becoming a weekly presence in America’s living rooms in 1954 with Disneyland, Disney broadcast his persona as ‘Uncle Walt’ to the nation. Following his death, the question of ‘What Would Walt Do?’ continues to be considered by both the company and fans alike to analyse business decisions made across his eponymous conglomerate, conferring importance onto his posthumous star image. This paper will examine how Disney used various media texts, particularly television, to craft a star persona that superseded all other personalities at the studio, becoming a synecdoche for the company. It will also consider how Disney’s star image 3 is still utilised by the company today to evoke a trustworthy and nostalgic aura around its projects. Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England, Stardom and Iconicity: The Case of Sean Connery Reviewing Sean Connery’s brief cameo as Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood (1991), Magnus Linklater in The Times argued: ‘Connery’s ‘status is now more than that of megastar: Somewhere along the line he has become an icon.’ Linklater doesn’t go on to define iconicity in this context nor does he offer an explanation how and why the transition from ‘megastar’ to ‘icon’ occurred. However, he was clearly identifying something significant as this view was widely shared by other reviewers and by the directors and actors with whom Connery worked. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between stardom and iconicity, exploring the criteria by which stars might be said to become iconic. It uses Connery as a case study because he offers a particularly rich paradigm though which to examine the term. Connery came to prominence playing an iconic character, James Bond, and struggled to be accepted in other roles. It was only very gradually that he could develop a different persona and a different kind of iconicity, the one that Linklater saluted. In examining how and why this transition occurred, the paper also addresses the additional complication of his national iconicity, named ‘Scotland’s Greatest Living National Treasure’ in a 2011 poll and hailed by the Scottish Tourist Board as ‘the only human being all visitors can instantly identity as a Scot’. In exploring the processes of iconicity, the paper also focuses on three problematics: 1) Agency: how much control was Connery able to exercise? 2) Typicality: how representative is Connery? 3) Historical specificity: how far is Connery’s iconicity the product of a specific period in the history of film stardom? Saki Kobayashi, Stockholm University, ‘Pansarskeppet Kvinnligheten’ Deconstructed: A Study on the Swedish Stardom of Eva Dahlbeck Eva Dahlbeck was one of Sweden’s most respected and popular actresses from the 1940s to the 1960s and is now remembered for, most notably, her dazzling performance in Smiles of the Summer Night (1956) by Ingmar Bergman, who allegedly nicknamed her “Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten” (“H.M.S.

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