Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2023.2176243
Landon Palmer
{"title":"Pop ubiquity: Cameo Performance as Star Management","authors":"Landon Palmer","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2023.2176243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2023.2176243","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49312894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-02-07DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2023.2173016
L. Englund
{"title":"Celebrity myth-making: from Marilyn M. to Kim K","authors":"L. Englund","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2023.2173016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2023.2173016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44994884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2023.2169074
S. Overholt, Stephanie L. Gomez
{"title":"Will the real Paris Hilton please stand up?: The personae, popular feminism, and female celebrity of Cooking with Paris","authors":"S. Overholt, Stephanie L. Gomez","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2023.2169074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2023.2169074","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42799861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159669
Alice Guilluy, Eleonora Sammartino
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"Alice Guilluy, Eleonora Sammartino","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2159669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2159669","url":null,"abstract":"On 26 November 2019, at the height of the bitterly fought General Election campaign which saw a landslide win for Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, Hugh Grant tweeted: ‘Young people – today is your last chance. Register to vote or I will make another enchanting romantic comedy. #registertovote TACTICALLY’. (Grant 2019). The quip neatly encapsulates the actor’s career trajectory, and underlines some of the key tensions and facets within his star persona that have drawn our interest in this issue: the trademark selfdeprecation (with its strong connection to Englishness – more on this below), and the simultaneous disavowal and embracing of the genre he is most associated with in favour of a higher-brow political engagement. Like his romcom peer Matthew McConaughey, Grant had also very publicly moved away from the romantic comedy: his turn as a villainous washed-up actor in the box-office-hit Paddington 2 (2017) had sparked rumours of an Oscar campaign (Ehrlich 2018), and he had received significant plaudits for his role as disgraced politician Jeremy Thorpe in Russell T. Davies and Stephen Frears’s A Very English Scandal (2018), encompassing his first Emmy nomination and nods for the BAFTA TV, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards. This pair of acclaimed performances was accompanied by an intense promotional campaign (e.g. his appearances on The Graham Norton Show 2017, Late Night with Seth Meyers 2018, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert 2018), in which Grant reinforced his ‘reluctant actor’ persona (York 2018), while also offering new insights into the relationship between his off-screen life and his newfound enjoyment of acting. The media attention only intensified when Grant interpreted the charmingly murderous Jonathan Fraser, opposite Nicole Kidman in HBO’s The Undoing (2020). Despite many reviewers remarking on the hammy plot, Grant’s villainous turn was widely praised, often seen as the main strength of the show (Baldwin 2020, Jones 2020, Tellerico 2020). With The Undoing, Grant replicated the nominations at the Emmy, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, amongst the others, although once again a win eluded him. Interest in Hugh Grant has by no means diminished since, as recently demonstrated by the rumours spread by the British tabloid Daily Mirror (Pryer 2022), quickly debunked by the actor via Twitter (Grant 2022), that he would have played the 14 incarnation of the titular character in a ‘Marvel-style’ revamp of Doctor Who. It was this career renaissance, and his increased political engagement, which sparked our interest in this Special Issue, as we first started to work on it in 2019. As his performances in Paddington 2 and A Very English Scandal started to garner plaudits, critics began to talk of a ‘Hugh Grant renaissance’ (a ‘Grantaissance’?), not dissimilar from the McConaissance (Syme 2016) that the other romcom leading man had experienced only a","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42230838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159674
L. Soberon
{"title":"Razor-sharp charms: Hugh Grant’s image renegotiation and the turn to villains","authors":"L. Soberon","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2159674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2159674","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the last decade, Hugh Grant has been going through something resembling a career revival. After retreating from his roles as an English gentleman and romantic lead during the mid-2000s, Grant has recently re-emerged to garner critical acclaim in productions, such as Paddington 2 (2017), The Gentlemen (2019), and The Undoing (2020). What these roles have in common is that Grant has abandoned his days as prince charming in favour of a series of unlikeable characters and morally complex villains. This article analyses how this turn to villain signifies a renegotiation of Hugh Grant’s star image and how this career revival stands into contact with his previous persona. Combining a close reading of some of Grant’s recent films, together with a discussion of press discourse and interviews, I account for how Grant’s villain performances are shaped and mediated by different artistic, commercial, and discursive forces. As such, I elucidate how Grant’s renegotiation of his image helps distances himself from his previous career phase, is utilised by filmmakers to subvert audience expectations, and invites us to question the patriarchal and English imperialist attitudes that lay embedded in his previous performances.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44618611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159672
Lydia Millington
{"title":"Just a famous actor sitting in front of a judge: Hugh Grant’s presentation of self in the Leveson inquiry","authors":"Lydia Millington","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2159672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2159672","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT With its attempts at humour, loosely controlled expressive behaviour and balance of haughtiness and deference, Hugh Grant’s testimony for the Leveson inquiry is rich territory for the analysis of celebrity self-presentation that complicates the dichotomous paradigm of ‘persona’ versus ‘veridical self’. Through detailed analysis of Grant’s physicality and use of prosody, this article focuses on his performance of status and use of humour during the cross-examination. These are contextualised within his diegetic and interview performances to argue that, in this presentation of self, Grant showcases his comedic performance technique but seems less concerned with presenting a signature set of mannerisms, which scholars have noted conventional star performance entails. Rather, Grant performs his celebrity status through a posture of stiff hauteur, which enables the humour in his self-deprecating remarks, both of which are key elements of his persona.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41429499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159670
Claire Monk
{"title":"‘Such emotional sterility proves ideal for the role’: Hugh Grant’s proto-celebrity and its media (self-)construction around Maurice","authors":"Claire Monk","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2159670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2159670","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Resumés of Hugh Grant’s career routinely note his performance as the repressed, upper-class Clive Durham in James Ivory’s groundbreaking gay Edwardian drama Maurice (1987) as his breakthrough role. However, Grant’s subsequent rise to global romcom stardom and celebrity since Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) has gradually occluded this earlier career phase from consideration as a significant moment in the formation of the ‘Hugh Grant’ persona. This research interrogates this interpretative gap by exploring the mediated self-/construction and sense-making interpretation of Grant’s persona in and around Maurice as manifested in the film’s 1987 media coverage. Also drawing on Ivory’s casting files, and comparatively on media which focused on all three of Maurice’s young ‘unknown’ male stars, the study explores how the ‘Hugh Grant’ of the late 1980s prefigures, denaturalises and unsettles later understandings of romcom ‘Hugh Grant’, including problematising his relation to New Man masculinities and foregrounding questions of class. The recent career narrative of Grant’s ‘new’ turn towards serious roles is likewise challenged by attention to his tragicomic performance in Maurice, which his Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal (2018) would reflexively echo 31 years later.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48129667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159673
R. Feasey
{"title":"Fop, bounder and post-feminist father: Hugh Grant and the changing face of modern masculinity","authors":"R. Feasey","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2159673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2159673","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Extant research on Hugh Grant’s star image routinely combines issues of masculinity, sexuality and national identity. Such work concludes that the stumbling, stammering English gent that he mastered for the character of Charles Thacker in Four Weddings and a Funeral or the dishonourable bounder and morally reprehensible cad that he played so brilliantly in Bridget Jones’s Diary is a perfect fit with the man himself. Either way, this article will consider the ways in which film critics and commentators have read and responded to Grant’s on-screen performances and off-screen persona in order to open up a dialogue about shifting iterations of masculinity. Grant is routinely at the forefront of changing definitions of modern manhood, morphing from New Man to New Lad before being constructed and circulated as a figurehead of post-feminist fatherhood. In short, Grant stands as a testament to the very fluid, flexible and shifting nature of the hegemonic hierarchy.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46065723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Celebrity StudiesPub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2161404
C. Rojek
{"title":"The larceny of the last second: the case for transcendence","authors":"C. Rojek","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2161404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2161404","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47458551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}