Pub 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}
Pub 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}
Pub 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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159669
Alice Guilluy, Eleonora Sammartino
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
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159674
L. Soberon
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159672
Lydia Millington
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159670
Claire Monk
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.
摘要休·格兰特(Hugh Grant)的职业生涯履历经常提到,他在詹姆斯·艾沃里(James Ivory)开创性的爱德华时代同性恋戏剧《莫里斯》(Maurice)(1987)中饰演压抑的上流社会克莱夫·达勒姆(Clive Durham),这是他的突破性角色。然而,自1994年的《四个婚礼和一个葬礼》(Four Weddings and a Funeral)以来,格兰特随后成为全球浪漫喜剧明星和名人,逐渐将这一早期的职业生涯阶段从“休·格兰特”形象形成的重要时刻中抹去。这项研究通过探索格兰特在莫里斯及其周围的角色的中介自我/建构和意义解释来质疑这种解释差距,正如电影1987年的媒体报道所表现的那样。该研究还借鉴了艾沃里的选角档案,并与关注莫里斯三位年轻的“不知名”男明星的媒体进行了比较,探讨了20世纪80年代末的“休·格兰特”是如何预示、变性和扰乱后来对浪漫喜剧《休·格兰特》的理解的,包括质疑他与新男性气质的关系,以及突出阶级问题。格兰特最近的职业生涯叙事“新”转向严肃角色,同样受到了人们对他在《莫里斯》中悲喜剧表演的关注的挑战,31年后,他在《非常英国的丑闻》(2018)中的杰里米·索普(Jeremy Thorpe)本能地呼应了这一点。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2159673
R. Feasey
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.
{"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}
Pub 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}