ABSTRACT
What defines a film star or a glamorous celebrity? What is it about them, at least in mythic terms, that attracts attention, commands identification, and lights up the screen? In filmic terms the star is often defined as a potent synthesis between an incredible face and a perfect body. The star's face, when captured in cinematic close-up, supposedly reveals their absolute beauty and acts as a metaphorical doorway into their inner being. The face of Greta Garbo, for example, is:
Offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature ... The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light (Barthes, 1985: 650-1).
