Abstract
At the root of the biopic’s critical rather than commercial estimation is that it is a genre that ‘belongs’ to the actor. Drawing on pressbooks, trailers, trade and fan magazines, this chapter considers the foundational queen biopics of the 1930s as strategically designed as star adaptations and rather than regarding these films as depicting historical women thrust against their wills into the public gaze (when all they want is to be “a woman in a man’s arms”), this chapter discusses how these biopics blatantly pander to a fan base, and, through marketing and casting, tell the stories of Hollywood queens: Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress (1934), Katharine Hepburn in Mary of Scotland (1936) and Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938).
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Cartmell, D. (2017). Star Adaptations: Queen Biopics of the 1930s. In: Grossman, J., Palmer, R. (eds) Adaptation in Visual Culture. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58580-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58580-2_8
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