Female Stars of British Cinema
Subtitle: The Women in Question
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9781474405645
Subjects: Motion picture actors and actresses, great britain; Actors, great britain
Description: Film stars are often seen as a Hollywood creation, but this book explores how British cinema developed its own culture of stardom, creating female stars who were not only loved by British audiences but also internationally admired. This book uses case studies of seven female stars whose career span the period from the 1940s to the present day - Jean Kent, Diana Dors, Rita Tushingham, Glenda Jackson, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Lloyd and Judi Dench - as a way of exploring how British star femininities have developed over time, and how the image of the British female star has responded to broader social and cultural changes. These "women in question" offer a way into the complexities of British cinema's distinctive variant of female stardom, which has sometimes espoused glamour and sometimes rejected it, and which is profoundly entangled with issues of regional, national and ethnic identity, as well as class, sexuality and age. Exploring and investigating the variety of female stars produced by British cinema over the last seventy-five years, this book also interrogates some of the ongoing omissions and absences from that same firmament.