ABSTRACT
Despite the early interest shown by the Prague School, the role of the actor as re-presenter of signs has barely been examined. 1 Thus one of the main purposes of this chapter is to focus attention on the categories and variables that I take to be essential to the semiotics of acting in film and, by extension, television. My second purpose is to develop a means of reconciling a ‘political economy’ approach to stardom in mainstream (Hollywood) cinema and the theorisation of the star as an interplay of representation and identification. The crux of my argument is that stardom is a strategy of performance that is an adaptive response to the limits and pressures exerted upon acting in the mainstream cinema.
