Introduction

Biography as a form of story-telling or history-writing has frequently been a subject of literary analysis (Strachey 1918, Heilbrun 1988, Epstein 1991, Evans 1999), as well as of histories of religion via the study of hagiography (Head 2001) and of histories of film via the study of the biopic (Custen 1992, Bingham 2010, Brown and Vidal 2014, Cheshire 2015). Film historians’ studies of particular stars, such as Mae West (Curry 1996, Hamilton 1997, Leider 1997), Rita Hayworth (McLean 2004), and James Dean (DeAngelis 2001), have cited biographical narratives in their exploration of their subjects’ career trajectories or of the historical development of performing styles and star–audience relations. In addition to garnering the attention of this established scholarship, celebrity biographies, as evidenced in best-selling books and award-winning films, television movies, and serials, enjoy great public popularity. However, while media scholars extract value(s) from individual celebrity biographies in analysing a text, performance, or image, celebrity studies scholarship has given scant attention to biography as a subject of investigation in itself. This is to say, celebrity studies scholarship has rarely analysed biography – in terms of its formal, cultural, inter-medial, ideological, and historical dimensions – even as it serves as the main vehicle of scholarly and popular knowledge of celebrities.

Historian of fame Leo Braudy has pointed to the role of autobiography and biography in consolidating or validating historical subjectivities, or in transitioning to new ones in moments of cultural, social, and political transformation. From the use of auto/biography in the early Christian period to glorify God through stories of exemplary characters, to its use in the age of empire and industrial revolution to elevate the secularised professional or ‘career man’, the genre has, according to Braudy (1986, p. 169), carried on the polemical question of ‘man’s nature’. If one was to agree with Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni’s idea of the celebrity as part of a ‘powerless elite’ in a mass-mediated society, then celebrity biography would be one of media’s presentations of certain figures to the public as ‘candidates’ for election to stardom; that is, for consideration as objects of collective interest, identification, and evaluation (Alberoni 2007, p. 74).

Richard deCordova’s (1990, p. 21) historiographic study of early film stardom, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, delineates the processes by which the social subjectivities of actors and fans were enmeshed as the actor became ‘increasingly individualized’ through writing that promises to reveal what ‘he or she is “really like” behind the screen’. The fan is engaged and the star is born, the celebrity solidified, as the actor becomes a biographical subject – given ‘a personality, a love life, and perhaps even a political persuasion’ (deCordova 1990, p. 21). deCordova’s account of early film stardom, which makes a distinction between the actor known only for the roles he or she plays and the film star known also through biography, emphasises the definition of the star as an object of knowledge. In this Foucauldian-influenced historiography, self-as-authoring agent is a discursive construct, with biography playing a large role in imposing intentionality, coherence, and stability on a fluid and perhaps incoherent identity while engendering a belief in a private ‘real’ behind the public façade. More recent scholarship on celebrity that also employs Foucault’s theoretical insights on authorship/knowledge/power has suggested that contemporary celebrity autobiographies and ghost-written celebrity memoirs offer (the semblance of) authenticity and intimacy to negotiate the terrain of celebrity culture in which fans and readers, as well as the authoring celebrity, are enmeshed as they attempt to define and justify certain kinds of selfhood (Lee 2014, Yelin 2016).

Feminist sociologist Mary Evans (1999, p. 22) has pointed to how such biographical impositions of coherence have served the status quo, while literary critic William H. Epstein (1991, p. 2) has argued that biography has been ‘a vehicle for the transmission and transcriptions’ of ‘political, religious, social, and economic, and cultural structures of authority’ (1991). But Epstein also claims that biography represents or enacts the self’s resistance as well as submission to these structures of authority, a point compatible perhaps with Barry King’s (1986, 2015) notion of the star as having limited forms of agency, or with Richard Dyer’s (1986, p. 17) argument that stars/celebrities fascinate because they ‘enact [through auto/biography among other vehicles] ways of making sense of the experience of being a person in a particular kind of social production’.

The articles in this issue of Celebrity Studies explore a variety of ways that biography informs the construction of celebrity discourse, the public’s knowledge of celebrities, and media industries’ use of celebrity life stories as a way to engage audiences and/or control the narratives about their own histories. Amelie Hastie’s article looks at how televisual and filmic co-starrings of Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and John Cassavetes construct, over a period of many years, a biography of these actors’ friendship. Yet the appeal and coherence of their appearances in any given instance rely on audience foreknowledge of already known biographical narratives of their lives and careers, as well as a belief in a certain authenticity of the relationships among the three actors even when they are playing fictional characters. Hastie’s intermedial and intertextual approach to biography gestures towards an understanding of the form’s performative dimensions, its imbrications with notions of intentionality, and the impossibility of any single biographical text’s claim of totality and completion.

Mary Desjardins’ article examines the biographical narratives of silent film star Clara Bow, from stories about the star’s life in fan magazines and scandal publications of the 1920s and ‘30s to print biographies in the 1970s and ‘80s to film and video documentaries of the 1980s and ‘90s. Her interest in this 70-year spread of biographical narratives is in relation to their claims about Bow’s mental illness and to their uses of those claims to frame the star’s relationship to agency as well as enhance their own status as truth-tellers. For this reason, Desjardins explores the similarities between biography and scandal as forms of story-telling that have to be deciphered in terms of who has the authority to tell their own life stories or those of others, echoing Epstein’s contention that biography can represent submission and/or resistance to structures of authority.

Through an examination of post-war manifestations of the ‘backstudio’ picture – a genre that integrates the process of moviemaking into the plot of a film – Steven Cohan examines how the biography of Marilyn Monroe has been positioned as a template for biopics that focus upon the career trajectories of female movie stars. Cohan demonstrates that by typecasting Monroe as a symbol of sexual excess and constructing the progression of her life story in terms of personal failures for which she is wholly responsible, Hollywood has continued to compromise the female star’s relationship to agency by transforming political into personal issues, and eschewing any suggestion of the film industry’s responsibility for a female star’s decline. Cohan asserts that the factor of ‘uncertainty’ surrounding the ambiguous circumstances of the actress’s life and death has motivated the numerous Monroe and Monroe-based biopics in both film and television across the past several decades, and that speculation surrounding these uncertainties has provided the fuel for generating a seemingly endless series of ‘versions’ of the actress’s life story.

While Cohan’s article positions gossip and scandal as catalysts for generating narratives of female disempowerment in post-war Hollywood, Ken Feil’s article frames gossip and scandal as expressions of agency by focusing on the biography of Jacqueline Susann. Discounted as an emblem of vulgarity in the 1960s and ‘70s with the publication of Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine, and Once Is Not Enough, susceptible to addictions, and destined for obscurity after a premature death from breast cancer, Susann might be said to represent a failed career in the context of traditional versions of celebrity narratives. By examining Susann’s appropriation by queer audiences in light of J. Halberstam’s notion of the subversive potential of ‘queer failure’, however, Feil demonstrates how star biography is capable of reframing ‘inability’ as a gesture of resilience and nonconformity that challenges heteronormative notions of success.

Aligned with Feil’s perspective on appropriation, Mark Hain’s article investigates the potential for queer audiences to enhance and deepen their affective connections to certain queer historical figures, and in the process to provide queer fans with needed anchors to the historical past. Hain investigates these possibilities in a study of Chris Connor, a popular singer of the cool jazz movement of the 1950s and early ‘60s who was not publically revealed to be lesbian until after her death in 2009. Hain argues that queer emotional investment in figures like Connor is intensified by the fact that very few details of the celebrity’s biography are known, rendering her more susceptible to queer re-interpretation, and to appropriation as a figure of the queer historical past. In his study, Hain correlates the unarticulated nature of the singer’s sexual orientation with the concept of coolness, one that offered her access to a subversive lifestyle that minimised the constraints imposed by traditional gender performance. Much as the discursive silence about Connor’s orientation signals the workings of a closeted mentality, Hain argues that coolness presents itself as its own form of closetedness, offering individual agency through artistic performance and expression on the condition that heightened emotions are tempered and restrained.

Michael DeAngelis’ article offers an analysis of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, an unconventional biopic centring upon Bob Dylan, a musical performer about whom popular news media have developed a number of discrete yet interrelated life stories. DeAngelis asserts that Haynes uses the biopic genre in order to challenge its assumptions and expectations regarding the presentation of a coherent life story, along with the story of a coherent life. DeAngelis posits that this interrogation works as a ‘queering’, a process of defamiliarising and de-normalising that ultimately reveals the heteronormative contexts of this genre. According to this analysis, queering becomes a process of restructuring biographical meaning, through the questioning of traditionally organised constructs of the formal conventions of the biopic, especially as they involve temporality, causality, teleology, audience identification, and identity formation of the biographical figure.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.