TY - CHAP
T1 - Greer Garson: Gallant Ladies and British Wartime Femininity
AU - Hamad, Hannah
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - The stardom of Greer Garson rose and fell contemporaneous with the duration of the Second World War. Her rise began with a lauded supporting role in Goodbye Mr Chips in 1939, and her decline was prompted by the poor performance of Adventure in which she and Clark Gable were sadly mismatched. In the interim however, she embodied a particular model of British (sometimes including inflections of Scottish and Irish) femininity that generated a persona characterised by noble, indomitable, altruistic, stoic figures with various literary, historical or contemporary origins ranging from Elizabeth Bennet in the 1940 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the revered scientist Marie Curie in Madame Curie (1943). 1942 marked the apotheosis of the saleability of this persona, with the release of Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest displaying twofold her characteristic domestic home-front “spirit of the blitz” fortitude, the success of which made her MGM’s most significant female star at that time.
AB - The stardom of Greer Garson rose and fell contemporaneous with the duration of the Second World War. Her rise began with a lauded supporting role in Goodbye Mr Chips in 1939, and her decline was prompted by the poor performance of Adventure in which she and Clark Gable were sadly mismatched. In the interim however, she embodied a particular model of British (sometimes including inflections of Scottish and Irish) femininity that generated a persona characterised by noble, indomitable, altruistic, stoic figures with various literary, historical or contemporary origins ranging from Elizabeth Bennet in the 1940 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the revered scientist Marie Curie in Madame Curie (1943). 1942 marked the apotheosis of the saleability of this persona, with the release of Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest displaying twofold her characteristic domestic home-front “spirit of the blitz” fortitude, the success of which made her MGM’s most significant female star at that time.
KW - classical Hollywood, film stardom, star system, 1940s, gender, ethnicity
M3 - Chapter
SN - 0813549647
T3 - Star Decades
SP - 142
EP - 165
BT - What Dreams Were Made Of: Movie Stars of the 1940s
A2 - Griffin, Sean
PB - Rutgers University Press
ER -