Elusive Selves: Italian Performers, Awards, Alleged Celebrity, and Self-Branding

ABSTRACT The article briefly outlines the properties of Italian quality film (and partly media) celebrity, as compared to the Hollywood template. Italian quality film celebrity is rooted in a different mode of production, which relies less on market performance and much more on a set of mediators, bestowing quality on a limited number of performers. This mode of production consequently underlines characteristics other than the private lives and personality privileged in discourse across the Atlantic, and relieves actors and actresses of the burden of self-promotion. Accordingly, their presence within the social media arena is reduced, associated with few of them working across different media, and with their being mostly elusive.