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'Passport to the Dream Factory: Hollywood and the Exotic Allure of Female Italian Ethnicity' is a feminist-inflected star study which explores articulations of ethnic femininity within Hollywood cinema. It does this via a case study approach, focus sing on Italian female stars whose careers took them to the US in successive decades and who each illustrate different aspects of the perception of Italian femininity in American society. Organised chronologically, the case studies explore the work of four Italian stars - Isa Miranda in the late 1930s, Alida Valli in the late 1940s, Anna Magnani in the mid-1950s and Vima Lisi in the mid-1960s. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate the complex ways in which Hollywood made use of Italian female stars, adapting their images and in some cases remodelling them for the purposes of the period in question. I use the work of Richard Dyer in White (1997) and Stars (1998) and Diane Negra in Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (2001), drawing on a number of scholarly disciplines and methods, including star studies, feminist film studies, cultural studies, and critical race and whiteness studies. The thesis relates the narrativisations of female Italianness in popular American cinema to the expression and negotiation of gender and ethnic identities in American culture at a given time in American history and argues that Hollywood makes ideological use of ethnic femininity in a manner which responds to the particular historical context. I conclude that Hollywood's construction of the personae of the Italian film stars I discuss was ideologically fraught. Located within specific historical, political and social conditions and circumstances in which they acquired significance and meaning, the American personae of Miranda, Valli, Magnani and Lisi articulated cultural fantasies around female Italianness that were supportive of patriarchal hegemony and whiteness as the norm.

This study is intended to examine the star persona of French actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud. By inquiring into both the character on and off screen I have analysed the career and performances of an actor who has laid a significant mark on contemporary French cinema. Whilst Léaud’s nouvelle vague image has become an enduring symbol within French cinema, little is known about Léaud from written texts alone. Moreover, he has not been readily accepted as a star in the same way as many of his male contemporaries. Using star studies as a theoretical approach, I am exploring the various characters Léaud has incarnated on screen, his performances, and the strong relationships he has forged with various directors throughout his career in seeking to conceptualise his star image. Looking at Léaud the person and Léaud the actor I hope to establish wherein lies the mythology surrounding this unique actor. By looking at stardom and spectatorship theory, I have explored the ways in which we can perceive Léaud as actor and star. The central question to this is: how do subjectivity and spectatorship shape our perceptions of what makes a star? Underlying this question are the various ambiguities and sites of contradiction that make up his star image. In examining such contradictions I have taken Richard Dyer’s Stars and Edgar Morin’s Les Stars as a starting point. This leads to a consideration of Dyer’s formulation of “alternative or subversive types” (Dyer 1979: 52) together with questions of gender representations and sexuality. The types embodied by Léaud’s characters are not idealised males as seen in the star personae of Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, and Gérard Depardieu among other French stars. Yet even within these more conventional star images, sites of contradiction are present that help qualify the ambiguities presented by Léaud’s star status. What is important here is Dyer’s notion that stars hold the capacity to bring together the ‘ordinary’ within sites of contradiction. This is presented by Léaud’s androgynous figure, the unlikely occupations undertaken by many of his characters, their awkward attempt to seduce women and subsequent unsatisfactory relationships, the concept of the flâneur, and a certain quirky comic side to these characters.

This investigation undertakes to re-centre the figure of the film star and their film appearances in the field of star study. To this end it uses Charlton Heston as its focus in a re-appraisal of existing methods of accounting for the star phenomenon in cinema. It also concomitantly re-assesses existing accounts of the significance of Charlton Heston as a film star. This thesis posits a robust method for identifying the specificities of the star’s contribution to a film’s meanings and effects across the body of their work by drawing on Andrew Britton’s understanding of the ‘star enactment’. Present approaches through which to engage with the details of a star’s performance are considered in detail and the weaknesses of those that seek to impose external schemas onto such discussions are highlighted. The difficulties with approaches that attempt to account for the star as a signifying phenomenon through the concepts of acting and performance are also considered. Existing methods which may allow for a fruitful investigation into the significance of the star enactment, such as the commutation test, are re- formulated in this study and their benefits are demonstrated through their application to key Heston star enactments. These new understandings are also made possible through the application of an ‘ekphrastic’ method of rendering film moments. Previous readings of Heston’s star figure are also re- appraised, and their conclusions questioned, through closer reference to the evidence of details from films. The fruitfulness of this method for analysing and commenting on film is thus demonstrated and Heston’s relationship to genre and its effect on performance style is also considered in order to be able to confidently assert the specific features of the Heston aesthetic.