Exploring British Film and Television Stardom, Queen Mary University of London, 1–2 November 2013

Abstract

Stardom and performance are resurgent areas within film and television studies, as evidenced by the recent flurry of conferences and books devoted to these subjects, including the ‘Revisiting Star Studies’ conference at Newcastle University, the ‘Cinematic Reflections on Stardom and the “Stardom Film’’’ conference at King’s College London in 2013, and the BFI Film Stars series, launched in 2012, which now boasts eight titles. Although star studies has been revitalised in the past few years, British stardom continues to be insufficiently investigated. The organisers of the ‘Exploring British Film and Television Stardom’ conference, Adrian Garvey and Julie Lobalzo Wright, felt the time was right to revisit the specific nature of British stardom and British stars. As the conference’s opening address suggested, this specificity has always sat uneasily within many of the tenets of star studies, especially the Hollywoodmodel of stardom that promotes the glamour, individualism and extraordinariness of stars, which appears at odds with British cultural values. However, the new wave of British stars who have found transatlantic success on US television, most notably Hugh Laurie, extends the long history of British stars in Hollywood and also complicates issues of national and transnational identity in the new media landscapes. Many of these tensions were apparent in the first conference keynote by Melanie Bell (Newcastle) who concentrated on female stardom and agency through a case study of Julie Christie, a star who sought to associate herself with symbolic capital (auteurs, awards), but has often