‘Marginal moments of spectacle’: Character Actors, Cult Stardom and Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

In 1986, Harry Dean Stanton was celebrated in the New York Times as a character actor who had achieved cult star status (Oney 1986). This redefinition of Stanton emphasized the loss of his supposed anonymity to audiences through noted roles in Paris, Texas (1984), Fool for Love (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986) and through the circulation of other extratextual knowledge such as friendships with established stars, which raised his public profile. Unacknowledged by the author was the parallel role played by the newspaper itself in treating Stanton as a public star-figure worthy of nationally distributed copy. Here, the concept of ‘cult stardom’ was created by applying established paradigms of stardom to a secondary cult figure. To treat a performer as a star is to recognize them, to name them and to acquire knowledge of them beyond their screen work; to treat them as a ‘cult star’ is to do this to examples of hitherto marginalized actors who are not actively publicized by employers as conventional star figures.