While there are many potential areas of inquiry within Richard Dyer’s (1998) Stars , I find myself gravitating towards a fundamental question: what is the star’s relationship to celebrity? Are the two synonymous? I find that the terms are often interchangeable colloquially, so long as they both refer to the traditional Hollywood celebrity. But how does one define celebrity? Dyer proposes a number of ways to conceptualize the star, one of them being Alberoni’s (1963) argument that stars are “people ‘whose institutional power is very limited or non-existent, but whose doings and way of life arouse a considerable and sometimes even a maximum degree of interest’ (p. 75)” (p. 7). The notion of a lack of institutional power is highly debatable—especially in transnational contexts where celebrities and geopolitics are explicitly tied—but what I am most interested in is the focus on the star’s “way of life.” Certainly, the importance of a star’s personal life opens a pathway for influencers an
Group 1: Realist or Naturalist Style Definition: The naturalistic acting method involves creating a character based on a realistic representation, avoiding exaggeration and artificial mannerisms. As Barry Kind defines it in his article "Articulating Stardom," "Naturalism [is] the mode of the individual, his or her utterances, behavior and appearance in everyday setting, gives a privileged access to personal and collective realities" (172). The acting blurs in an impersonation that does not articulate ideas of characterization directly related to facilitating plot signifiers. This mode of acting conflicts with some notions of stardom, as "the actor confronts problems in characterization that relate to his or her being as a general cultural object rather than a theatrical object" (King 173). As Dyer points out, the naturalistic ideas of acting in Diderot and Coquelin method, states that the actor should never lose their role and should perform by observing
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