ABSTRACT
At fi rst glance, Mills’s account of celebrity, which had appeared four years before Boorstin’s (1962) ‘well-known for being well-known’ portrayal, appears to follow a similar pathway. Mills wrote that the stars of movies, theatre and television ‘are celebrated because they are displayed as celebrities’, so that ‘[r]ather than being celebrated because they occupy positions of prestige, they occupy positions of prestige because they are celebrated’ (1957: 74). But he also makes a number of other important observations about celebrity that take his account in a very different and much more analytical direction, to reveal far more about the underlying dynamics of celebrity society.
