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For a while, there's been talk of 'the death of stardom', with young actors not able to match the clout of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Will Smith et al. But that might be changing. There has been no lack of conjecture about what, precisely, makes a Movie Star.

Most people would easily name examples for you, but might struggle to define why or how those examples were special. Film scholar Richard Dyer calls the star both "ordinary and extraordinary" in his seminal 1979 text, Stars, while academic and writer Jeanine Basinger, in her 2007 book The Star Machine, writes of Hollywood's production line: "Sometimes a manufactured product turned out perfectly. Sometimes it blew up in the shopping cart".



And as Lauren Bacall once put it: "Stardom isn't a profession. It's an accident." For the powers that be, it certainly seems that whenever you try to bottle it or reproduce stardom, it vanishes.

Many square-jawed hunks who look the part – say, Sam Worthington in Avatar, for instance – have been tried out by major Hollywood studios and fallen totally flat with audiences. Meanwhile others – like skinny teenager Timothée Chalamet in gay romance Call Me By Your Name – have climbed a strange and stellar path to the A-list. He is starring in mega-sci-fi franchise Dune , whereas in another decade he'd be doomed to playing foppish kid brothers in perpetuity.

The fact that stardom has a kind of sketchy refusal to follow any exact science is maybe what makes it so endlessly fascinating t.

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