The Drama of Celebrity

This book shows that there is a great deal more the celebrity then a superficial analysis might suppose. The central figure is Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) who was one of the first celebrities in the sense that we have come to understand the term. The book contains a great deal about her fascinating life and career in its various phases. The central contention of the book is that celebrity arises from an interaction between the people themselves, various publics and the media. Celebrities have to be adept at self-promotion in addition to displaying their talents. The author identifies in a series of chapters a number of key features, which she illustrates with historical examples: defiance, sensation, savagery, intimacy, multiplication, imitation, judgement and merit. While the marketplace is now dominated by the Internet, in late 19th-century Paris the most popular newspaper was selling 500,000 copies a day while capitalising on the same kind of stories. There is an uncanny resemblance between the careers of Davy Crockett and Donald Trump, highlighting the book's emphasis on continuity so far as celebrity culture is concerned. It is true that we get the celebrities we deserve, then they become a mirror image of the culture at large.