This concluding chapter goes back over the time period covered by the book’s preceeding chapters and thinks about the exclusisons from the category of star which have operated in British cinema, with particular emphasis on the whiteness of the ‘English Rose’ ideal which still dominates British female stardom in spite of some inroads towards a greater BAME presence and greater ethnic diversity. The exclusionary middle-class and heteronormative dimensions to idealised visions of British femininity are also assessed.
This chapter explores the emergence and long career of British sex symbol Diana Dors, with a particular emphasis on the height of her film career in the 1950s (and her temporary relocation to Hollywood) but also examines her ongoing self-fashioning as a celebrity in the decades beyond her moment as a pin-up.
The last case study chapter examines the later-life stardom of Dame Judi Dench who has been acclaimed not only as an excellent actress but also a model for ageing gracefully. Her stardom represents a more recent strain of gerontophilia in contemporary cinema, both in Britain and overseas, which has offered new opportunities for stardom for a number of older actresses, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren among them.
This chapter compares and contrasts the fortunes of two different teenage discoveries of 1980s British cinema, Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Lloyd, finding similarities in the prurient sexualisation attached to their personae but distinctive differences in terms of their class identities (both on and off screen) and their work in divergent genres. Their different experiences of working in Hollywood and career longevity are also discussed.
This chapter looks at shifts in the configuration of female stardom in British cinema in the 1960s, making use of a detailed case study of the new ‘quirky’ model of screen stardom represented by Liverpudlian actress Rita Tushingham and how she navigated a career from the British New Wave realist film movement to the phenomenon of ‘swinging London’ in the mid to late 1960s.
Moving on from the 1960s into the 1970s, a notoriously penurious decade for British film production after the sixties boom, this chapter examines the film career of Glenda Jackson, one of the few female British stars who flourished in the 1970s. It looks at her persona in terms of its perceived abrasiveness and sexual or social challenge as well as examining how critics debated the value of her physical beauty.
This chapter provides a detailed case study of the stardom of Gainsborough Studios’ star Jean Kent, focussing on her rise to fame in the 1940s, and her sizeable fan following during that period, but also examining the difficulty of sustaining that stardom in subsequent decades.
This chapter provides an introductory overview to the book’s focus on female British stars, explains the parameters of the study and its principle methods, and provides some broader historical contextualisation of ideas of stardom in British cinema culture from the silent period to the present day.