1. Film criticism has of course been more receptive than theatre writing: e.g., Affron, Charles, Star Acting (New York: Dutton, 1977)Google Scholar. In theatre, most celebrity material tends to suppose that celebrities are consummate artists; but when their secrets are recorded, the result is usually disappointing: e.g., Morrow, Lee Alan and Pike, Frank, eds., Creating Theater (New York: Vintage, 1986Google Scholar) and Funke, Lewis and Booth, John, eds., Actors Talk about Acting (New York: Avon, 1961)Google Scholar.

2. Shickel's, RichardIntimate Strangers: the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Doubleday, 1985Google Scholar) provides an engaging, provocative commentary on the process of celebrity making (and unmaking), but his thesis, like most, concentrates on the phenomenon's pernicious effects, like its relation to political violence.

3. Boorstin's, DanielThe Image: a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1961Google Scholar) provides an etymology and brief history of celebrity which, while ahead of its time, is typical in its emphasis on celebrity as a typically Amercian problem coincident with capitalism and the arrival of cinema. He makes no connection with earlier star systems, nor with other media that confer presence, like radio, but most importantly he overlooks the relation of the system of celebrity to similar systems of illusive closure that are overtly political, like the cult of personality in communist states.

4. , Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. Pollock, W. H. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957)Google Scholar. For its deconstructive reading, see , Derrida's essays on Artaud in Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

5. Connections between the science of behaviour and acting theory have been criticized in Roach, Joseph, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: Delaware University Press 1985)Google Scholar.

6. The mystification implicit in the romantic view of the actor continues today: for example, in Bates, Brian, The Way of the Actor: a Path to Knowledge and Power (Boston: Shambhala, 1987)Google Scholar.

7. Zich, Otakar, Estetika dramatického umění (Prague: Melantrich, 1931)Google Scholar. For an English summary of the theory see Deák, František, ‘Structuralism in Theater: the Prague School Contribution’, The Drama Review, XX, 4 (12. 1976), p. 83–94Google Scholar.

8. See Mukařovský's, Jan exemplary study, ‘Chaplin inCity Lights: an Analysis of a Dramatic Figure’, in Structure, Sign and Function, trans. Burbank, J., ed. Steiner, Peter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

9. For the most detailed exposition of these concepts, see Veltruský, Jiřri, ‘Contribution to the Semiotics of Acting’, Sign, System and Meaning: a Quinauagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, ed. Matejka, Ladislav (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Studies, 1976)Google Scholar.

10. Veltruský describes these conventional separations – distinctness, continuity, etc. – in ‘Acting and Behaviour: a Study in the Signans’, Semiotics of Drama and Theater, ed. Schmid, H. and Van Kesteren, A. (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984)Google Scholar.

11. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah (New York: Schocken, 1977)Google Scholar; Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford University Press. 1960)Google Scholar.

12. The resistance to theatrical signification is the special thesis of States, Bert, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, which nevertheless bases its study of ‘phenomenal modes’ in acting on the Prague School model. I owe the Benjamin example, too, to States.

13. In the traditional context of folk drama this phenomenon has been thoroughly debated and described in Veltrusky, Jiř, ‘Notes Regarding Bogatyrev's Book on Folk Theater’, Poeiics Today, Winter 1986Google Scholar.

14. See my analysis of , Brecht's acting devices from this standpoint in ‘The Semiosis of Brechtian Acting: a Prague School Analysis’, Gestus: a Quarterly Journal of Brecht Studies (Winter 1986)Google Scholar, and ‘St;vejk's Stage Figure: Illustration, Design, and the Representation of Character’, Modern Drama (September 1988). Historically, Brecht's association with star actors – Laughton, Weigel, Lenya, Schall – seems to be a key factor in the elaboration and reception of his acting theory, their celebrity allowing the split to be observed.

15. One theorist who has noted the conditioning effect of such information is Esslin, Martin, The Field of Drama (London: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar.

16. For an exposition of this circular logic see Heidegger, Martin, Identity and Difference, trans. Stambaugh, Joan (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)Google Scholar.

17. In psychoanalytic terms the celebrity would be considered phallic, an illusion of a stable signifier that orders the system of signification. I see no reason, however, for this illusive stability to be essentially male in any more than its dominant historical sense.

18. For substantiation of this view of the Theatre Duke, look no further then Helen Chinoy's standard study, ‘The Emergence of the Director’, Directors on Directing, eds. , Cole and , Chinoy (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 22–3Google ScholarPubMed, which reads: The authority of the Duke as Regisseur, director, made possible this complex integration. Although he was assisted by his wife and by his stage manager, Ludwig Chronegk, he alone was the artistic creator of each production. He designed the sets and costumes, but he went further and designed every movement and every position on stage. He dictated the very folds of each actor's costume. Everyone in his small theatre had to be subservient to the production, whose form he determined and sustained through an iron discipline. The mob scenes, for which the Meininger were greatly admired, were made possible by this discipline. Each actor had to take his turn as a supernumerary; those who refused were dismissed from the company. The Duke's ensemble was the product of his skill in using actors as theatrical material, rather than the natural result of individual acting talent at his disposal.

19. In Barish's, Jonas exposition. The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: California University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, the West seems to dispute the authenticity of theatre principally with recourse to authority (religious or political) rather than argument. Celebrity, then, insinuates acting into this anti-theatrical culture by using the rhetorical tools of its opponents, achieving both its acceptance and its potential for abuse.

20. Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Health, S. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977)Google Scholar; and Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author’, language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. and eds. Bouchard, D. and Simon, S. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

21. Vodička, Felix, arguably the founder of the aesthetics of reception, outlines this sanctioned process in ’Response to Verbal Art’, The Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. Matejka, L. and Titunik, I. R. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

22. See, for example, the selection of materials in Denis Bablet's series, Les Voies de la creation théâtrale (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).

23. , Veltruský, ‘Man and Object in Theater’, in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, trans, and ed. Garvin, Paul (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

24. Lacan, Jacques, ‘Of the Subject who is Supposed to Know’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sheridan, Alan, ed. Miller, J.-A. (New York: Norton, 1978)Google Scholar.

25. For examples see the notes of , Barthes and Tynan, Kenneth on Garbo, Greta in Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., eds. Cohen, M. and Mast, G. (Oxford University Press, 1985)Google ScholarPubMed.

26. Blau, Herbert, ‘Theater and Cinema: the Scopic Drive, the Detestable Screen, and More of the Same’, Blooded Thought (New York: PAJ Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

27. Notice the recent emergence of the casting director in screen credits.

28. , Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Ward, M. and Howard, R. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)Google ScholarPubMed.

29. Balazs, Bela, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Bone, Edith (London: Dobson, 1952)Google Scholar.

30. See the especially discouraging survey by Christine Gledhill, ‘Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism’, in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Mast and Cohen, p. 817–45.

31. de Lauretis, Teresa implies this position in her discussion of the star's body in ‘Snow on the Oedipal Stage’, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though she sees such images as always subsumed in male narratives.

32. I won't quite commit to this position, but only because I also don't quite accept the argument that the world has become an ideological theatre that ‘lacks reality’, and in which the stage, paradoxically, becomes a space for the creation of more authentic selfhood; cf.Lyotard, J.-F., Post-Modem Condition: a Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, G. and Massum, B. (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1984)Google Scholar. The world seems to me to mount an implacable (if entropic) resistance to its reduction into cultures, much like the object resists semiotic uses in the theatre.

33. Chaiken, Joseph, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Atheneum, 1972)Google Scholar.

34. Lacan, J., ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, A. (New York: Norton, 1977)Google Scholar.

35. Wilshire, Bruce makes the borders this theatrical self-making his special concern in Role Playing and Identity: the Limits of Theater as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, particularly in Part II, ‘Reality and the Self’.

36. Compare the performance of identity in the wayang kulit, outlined in Keeler, Ward, Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves (Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, to the material on celebrity and actors in sources like Braudy, Leo, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Gilman, Richard, 'The Actor as a Celebrity, in Humanities in Review, Vol. I, ed. Sennett, Richard et al. , (Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; or articles by Woods, Leigh and Postlewait, Thomas in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, eds. , Postlewait and McConachie, Bruce (Iowa University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.