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Gene Tierney : star of Hollywood's home front / Will Scheibel.

by Scheibel, Will, 1983- author.

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Detroit : Wayne State University Press, [2022]

Motion picture actors and actresses -- United States -- Biography.

9780814348215 (paperback) :

0814348211 (paperback)

Contemporary approaches to film and media series.

viii, 267 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

"This book does not presume to recover and speak for the "real" Tierney, nor does it speculate about her thoughts and feelings, which one cannot ever "really" know. But it does seek to restore some of her historical subjectivity that her monolithic reputation obscures. Despite the homogeneity of her contemporary image as the "the girl in the portrait," the structuring absence in Laura, her star-making, unmaking, and eventual remaking suggests considerable variability as a pinup girl, worker in a public labor force, army wife, mother, female psychiatric subject, and comeback star. Hollywood participated in the creation of a public sphere that allowed for the negotiation of women's everyday lives contemporaneous with the war and its aftermath-what we might call a "home-front modernity"-and gave rise to stars such as Tierney, whose home-front activities will be the subjects of the chapters that follow. The Hollywood star system in 1940s was different from what audiences had seen previously because, as Sean Griffin states in the introduction to his collection What Dreams Were Made Of, "stars increased their actual physical presence among the rest of the population, strengthening their connections to the general public." Studios helped maintain these connections by staging conversations about wartime and postwar experiences for the U.S. home front, a space emotionally and psychologically affected by World War II even if geographically distant from where it was fought. Here, stars such as Tierney appeared to share similar experiences as their audiences. Contextualizing the processes that made Tierney one of Fox's top stars of the 1940s, this book aims to understand her stardom through a "domestic" history of her period, an alternative to masculinist narratives of war effort and postwar trauma, at the same time as it hopes to redress the generalizations about her career"--

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