careers while creating others, has long fascinated
movie fans. And it has been treated with pathos as
well as humor in movies other than those discussed
here, including Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard(1950)
and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist(2011).
Acting in the Classical Studio Era
From the early years of moviemaking, writes film
scholar Robert Allen, “the movie star has been one
of the defining characteristics of the American cin-
ema.”^11 Most simply, a movie star is two people: the
actor and the character(s) he or she has played. In
addition, the star embodies an image created by the
studio to coincide with the kinds of roles associated
with the actor. That the star also reflects the social
and cultural history of the period in which that
image was created helps explain the often rapid rise
and fall of stars’ careers. But this description reveals
at its heart a set of paradoxes, as Allen points out:
The star is powerless, yet powerful; different from
“ordinary” people, yet at one time was “just like us.”
Stars make huge salaries, yet the work for which they
are handsomely paid does not appear to be work on
the screen. Talent would seem to be a requisite for
stardom, yet there has been no absolute correlation
between acting ability and stardom. The star’s private
life has little if anything to do with his or her “job” of
acting in movies, yet a large portion of a star’s image
is constructed on the basis of “private” matters:
romance, marriage, tastes in fashion, and home life.^12
British actor Dirk Bogarde drew a further dis-
tinction between film stars—“people with extro-
vert personalities and the sparkling quality that
puts the glamour, the glitter and the ‘stardust’ into
a very tough work-a-day job”—and film actors—
“people who without being great extrovert person-
alities or looking particularly glamorous... have
been trained in the craft of acting and... [are]
sound knowledgeable technicians.”^13
The golden age of Hollywood, roughly from the
1930s until the 1950s, was the age of the movie star,
and acting in American movies generally meant
“star acting.” During this period, the major studios
gave basic lessons in acting, speaking, and move-
ment; but because screen appearance was of para-
mount importance, they were more concerned with
enhancing actors’ screen images than with improv-
ing their acting.
During this period, when the studio system and
the star system went hand in hand, the studios had
almost complete control of their actors. Every six
months, the studio reviewed an actor’s standard
seven-year option contract: if the actor had made
progress in being assigned roles and demonstrat-
ing box-office appeal, the studio picked up the
option to employ that actor for the next six months
and gave him or her a raise; if not, the studio
dropped the option, and the actor was out of work.
The decision was the studio’s, not the actor’s. Fur-
thermore, the contract did not allow the actor to
move to another studio, stop work, or renegotiate
for a higher salary. In addition to those unbreak-
able terms, the contract had restrictive clauses
that gave the studio total control over the star’s
image and services; it required an actor “to act,
sing, pose, speak or perform in such roles as the
producer may designate”; it gave the studio the
right to change the name of the actor at its own dis-
cretion and to control the performer’s image and
likeness in advertising and publicity; and it
required the actor to comply with rules covering
interviews and public appearances.^14
These contracts turned the actors into the studios’
chattel. To the public, perhaps the most fascinating
thing about making actors into stars was the process
of changing their names. Marion Morrison became
John Wayne, Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk
Douglas, Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner became
Lana Turner, and Archibald Leach became Cary(^11) For a study of stars in Hollywood from which this section
liberally draws, see Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film
History: Theory and Practice(New York: Knopf, 1985), pp.
172–189, quotation, p. 174 (reprinted as Robert C. Allen, “The
Role of the Star in Film History [Joan Crawford],” in Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th ed., ed. Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999], pp. 547–561).
(^12) Allen and Gomery, p. 174.
(^13) Dirk Bogarde, qtd. in John Coldstream, Dirk Bogarde: The
Authorised Biography(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004),
p. 223.
(^14) Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business
Enterprise, 1930–1939 (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 145.
THE EVOLUTION OF SCREEN ACTING 299