Female Stars of British Cinema

Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question By Melanie Williams Film stars are often seen as a Hollywood creation but this book explores how British cinema developed its own culture of stardom, creating female stars who were not only loved by British audiences but also internationally admired. Female Stars of British Cinema uses case studies of seven female stars whose careers span the period from the 1940s to the present day - Jean Kent, Diana Dors, Rita Tushingham, Glenda Jackson, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Lloyd, and Judi Dench – as a way of exploring how British star femininities have developed over time, and how the image of the British female star has responded to broader social and cultural changes. These ‘women in question’ offer a way into the complexities of British cinema’s distinctive variant of female stardom, which has sometimes espoused glamour and sometimes rejected it, and which is profoundly entangled with issues of regional, national and ethnic identity, as well as class, sexuality and age. Exploring and investigating the variety of female stars British cinema has produced over the last seventy-five years, this book also interrogates some of the ongoing omissions and absences from that same firmament. Melanie Williams is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia.