‘A new woman’: the promotional persona of Anna Sten

Abstract

Anna Sten was a Russian émigré star who, thanks in great part to an aggressive promotional campaign, became a household name for the four years she was contracted to Samuel Goldwyn during the 1930s, only to fall into obscurity by the end of the decade. This article considers her ethnicity as a significant reason why she failed as a Hollywood star. I do this by means of a textural analysis of the various promotional texts (film stills, glamour portraits, press articles and fan magazine features) that shaped Sten's cumulative star persona by casting her in relation to contradictory stereotypes of ethnicity. The archived correspondence documents written by Samuel Goldwyn and members of his publicity department are another important source. These are illuminating in terms of the strategies employed by the studio in their marketing of Sten as ‘foreign’. This article builds upon the work of scholars such as Diane Negra, Christian Viviani and Linda Mizejewski on the representation of foreign stars in America during the first decades of the 20th century, as well as Philip Gleason's work on the assimilationist drive of the era. As the failure of Sten's ethnicity coded persona during the xenophobic 1930s suggests, during this era Hollywood and American society were apt to conceptualise ethnicity only in relation to a limited number of rigidly defined ethnic types.