Star Products, Star Capital, Fan Markets: Examining 1940s British Film Stardom Through Fan Club Publications

This paper is part on an ongoing project that examines the development of British film stars and their fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned but fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actresses Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, and Pat Roc, and the British fan club for American actress Deanna Durbin.

These resources, accessed from the Bill Douglas Archive (Exeter), the Steve Chibnall Collection (De Montfort) and the authors’ own collections, are contextualised with broader contemporaneous articles in newspapers, novels, film magazines and British and US industry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom.

Combined, these ancillary materials raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtures and maintains stars’ unique brands, star capital and fan-following, and around these particular stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth, status and levity during a period of socio-cultural and industrial upheaval and austerity in Britain and its film industry.

By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of these particular British film star personae and film star fan culture, this paper broadens our understanding of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, and offers valuable insights into star and fan labour and film fandom more generally, revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, of British star construction and dissemination, of studio control, reflexivity and of economic function, than has been commonly assumed.