• '

  Newton has subtlety, originality, and a wide range of reference . . . He has the knack of apt quotation . . . and sharp summary.

  '

  Sight and Sound

• '

  Show People examines how film stars shaped the medium, rather than vice versa. In fact, it's a collection of essays on individual actors, from Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin to Scarlett Johansson, sometimes focusing on a single film, sometimes on whole careers, and sometime just on gossip . . . [it] made me want to seek out some of the oddities and forgotten classics he mentions.

  '

  Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

• '

  Newton presents the history of film told through famous actors and the notable movies in which they starred. He discusses fifty stars across forty chapters grouped into five sections: 'The Silent Star' (e.g., Charlie Chaplin), 'The Golden Age' (e.g., Katharine Hepburn), 'National Cinemas—Stars for the Nation' (e.g., John Wayne), 'New Wave Stars' (e.g., Sidney Poitier), and 'Posthuman Stars' (e.g., Scarlett Johansson). Each chapter presents a brief biography of the actor and descriptions of his/her most influential films. Each of the stars included brought something new to film culture, and Newton highlights and contextualizes that 'something' in contemporary work. Infused throughout are musings on the ephemeral nature of stardom, from rise to fall. But rather than presenting a thesis of the mechanisms of gaining and maintaining popularity, this book discusses multiple stars, allowing the reader to make comparisons across time and draw parallels and distinctions. Recommended.

  '

  Choice

• '

  In Show People, professor and columnist Michael Newton waxes rhapsodic about a century of acting, with a special fondness for performances about performance . . . I spent a few nights rewatching movies I hadn't seen in a while, simply because of the way Newton writes about those small beats we love without knowing how to quite explain, the ones that can get reframed with new, wider context when you think about them more.

  '

  Genevieve Valentine, National Public Radio

• '

  Thorough and thoughtful, Michael Newton's Show People is a major addition to existing literature on the subject of film stardom. I can't wait to read it a second time.

  '

  Gary D. Rhodes, author of The Perils of Moviegoing in America and The Birth of the American Horror Film

Preface

Part One: The Silent Star
1 Mary Pickford: The Biograph Girl
2 Pola Negri: Inventing the Star
3 Charlie Chaplin: The Tramp

Part Two: The Golden Age
4 ‘Asta’ and ‘Cheeta’: The Animal Star
5 Peter Lorre: Character Actor
6 Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly: A Star Danced
7 Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant: The Public Image
8 Vivien Leigh: Ruinous Selves
9 Veronica Lake: Half-obscured Faces
10 Carole Lombard: The Screwball Heroine
11 Greer Garson and Joan Fontaine: The Forgotten Star
12 Orson Welles: The Film Star as Fragment and Failure
13 Ingrid Bergman: Intermezzo

Part Three: National Cinemas – Stars for the Nation
14 Lamberto Maggiorani and Maria Pia Casilio: Absent Film Stars in Vittorio De Sica’s Films
15 Moira Shearer: The Marionette
16 Gloria Swanson: Having a Face
17 Ava Gardner: I Am Not an Actress
18 Montgomery Clift: He’s Not There
19 Setsuko Hara: The Still Point
20 Toshiro Mifune: Studying Lions
21 Nargis and Raj Kapoor: My Heart Is Hindustani
22 Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni: Nothing Is Sadder than Laughter
23 John Wayne: How to Grow Old
24 Audrey Hepburn: Frankenstein’s Creature
25 Marilyn Monroe: The Suffering Star
26 Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner: Imitation of Life

Part Four: New Wave Stars
27 Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren: Torturing the Audience
28 Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant: The Strange Death of the Hollywood Golden Age
29 Anna Karina: The Muse
30 Celia Johnson and Julie Christie: The Adulterous Star
31 Sidney Poitier: The Defiant One
32 Dustin Hoffman: Little Big Man
33 Woody Allen: The Director as Star
34 Robert De Niro: For Real

Part Five: Posthuman Stars
35 Harrison Ford: Blade Runner and the Replication of the Person
36 Maggie Cheung: Centre Stage
37 Naomi Watts: Mulholland Drive
38 Scarlett Johansson: A New Kind of Emptiness
39 Shu Qi: A Placeless Heaven
40 Andy Serkis: Lear’s Shadow

Afterword
References
Acknowledgements
Index

Michael Newton teaches literature and film at Leiden University. He is the author of numerous popular books on film and cultural history, including Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), and Age of Assassins (2012), both for Faber & Faber, and two BFI Film Classics – Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary’s Baby (2019).