Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Communication Studies

The Polish actor Pola Negri embarked on her American film career in 1922, after signing a lucrative contract with Famous-Players Lasky. She was promoted as a fiery, European woman of temperament and ‘a wild cat … who doesn’t calculate’. Hollywood star discourse paid particular attention to romantic alliances between Negri and a number of successful screen actors; in generating this type of publicity, the studio ensured its chief star was portrayed as a passionate, continental diva. Yet the strategy proved to be a double-edged sword. First of all, the highly publicised, brief relationships with non-American men suggested a strong, active sexuality and unwillingness to settle down. Secondly, Negri’s public disclosure of grief after the death of her fiancé Rudolph Valentino violated the more reserved American norms of mourning, attracting criticism. Her marriage to Prince Serge Mdivani shortly after Valentino’s death caused outrage and reinforced her position as a star placed on the margins of the main current of American society. Fan magazines such as Photoplay ascribed Negri with the fixed, static persona of an Old-World diva, resistant to all attempts at Americanisation. As a result, Negri came to symbolise the most dreaded aspects of modernity in the person of the foreign woman, which effectively impeded the advancement of her Hollywood career.

The early 1920s witnessed a spike of interest in the import of European stars to Hollywood, as the film studios hired talent scouts to keep a constant watch on successful stage and film actors on the continent. Vilma Bánky’s Hollywood career began when she was signed to Samuel Goldwyn’s film studio in 1925. This paper analyses the characteristics of Bánky’s star image, particularly in relation to her conspicuously white features and the story of her discovery, which successfully located her within the Cinderella narrative. To the movie going public, Bánky achieved stardom through being discovered by a film producer rather than through conscious efforts, thus, her story was encoded as a patriarchal text that denied her any form of agency. Bánky’s star publicity suggested she incarnated the highest ideals of whiteness; her gentle way of being and feminine charm was a natural extension of her physical attributes. Fan magazines propagated the concept of perfect white womanhood by emphasising tranquillity, elegance and grace as characteristics inherent to her persona. ‘Miss Banky’s charm is a subtle, winsome appeal which one associates inevitably with the truly feminine’, declared one columnist writing for Picture Play. The fan discourse also showed Bánky as an eager subject of Americanisation, as an actress who owed her ‘lucky break’ not only to her producer, but an individual in debt to transformative power of America at large.