Not all stars have star presence, and those with star presence don’t always become stars. It’s easier to quantify stardom—through box-office receipts, salary per picture, dressing-room size—than it is to qualify star presence. Richard Dyer, the British scholar who helped establish star studies roughly thirty years ago, helped pin down this elusive, almost ineffable term when he wrote, with bracing simplicity, in 1993, “

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