Film stars must continuously negotiate their stardom status as they grow older in a highly mediated world where youth is considered a prime value – particularly in Western cultures. Whether a star is able to ‘age successfully’ has been a growing area of investigation in Film and Media Studies, under the banner of what has become known as ‘Ageing Studies’ (Basting 1998; Gullette 2004; Harrington, Bielby and Bardo 2014). Early scholars in the field have drawn from theories on feminism and gender to move away from a biological approach to ageing – gerontology – and instead to emphasise how we learn to act one's age. In other words, age, like gender and other markers of identity, is understood as a cultural construction (Gullette 2004; Lipscomb and Marshall 2010: 2; Swinnen 2012: 7). Mark McKenna's analysis of Sylvester Stallone for the Celebrity Studies journal, for example, explores how certain stars, like Stallone, have a rare level of iconicity that is indicative of a significant moment of cultural resonance which ‘often brings with it a refusal in popular culture to allow the iconic image to change, grow or evolve’ (2019: 501). Since that image inevitably does change, there is a perception that stars become redundant. However, some artists, like Stallone, have been able to capitalise on this narrative of redundancy and reconceptualise ageing as transition (McKenna 2019: 501). Even though Darín has never reached that level of iconicity in the public sphere, the typecasting he experienced at particular points in his career – mainly the galancito and the chanta imagery explored in previous chapters – have threatened him with an expiration date. In light of these realities, the following pages will explore whether he has also been able to reconceptualise his ageing as career transition.

Sabrina Qiong Yu states in her introduction to Revisiting Star Studies that ‘there is a common perception that ageing is less an issue for male stars than female stars, since appearance weighs much more in a female star's career. This explains why researchers focus heavily on ageing and female stars […]’ (2017: 5).

If there is one country in which Darín's stardom and popularity reached the same dimension as in Argentina, that country is Spain. Darín appeared for the first time in Spanish film theatres in 1994 with Perdido por perdido [Nothing to Lose] directed by Alberto Lecchi. At that time, Argentine films were slowly starting to gain more attention, thanks to the success of Un lugar en el mundo [A Place in the World] (1992), a film directed by Adolfo Aristarain which attracted the outstanding number of half a million spectators in commercial theatres (Colmena 1994; Elena 2011: 42). Inspired by those figures, and given that Lecchi was one of the script-writers of Aristarain's film, Perdido was destined to be one of only two Argentine films that made it to the Spanish big screen that year. Although Darín's presence in this film was not singled out by the critics at the time, who preferred to focus on the plot and the connections between Lecchi and Aristarain, the seed of Darín's Spanish stardom was being sown in many positive reviews of the film's performances (such as Torreiro's in 1994). Moreover, his character, an ordinary middle-class fellow in crisis who cleverly manages to run away with the money and the girl, marked a precedent for his lovable future characters.

Four years later, a co-production with Spain, El faro del sur [The Lighthouse] (1998), brought Darín back to Spanish shores. On that occasion, the 1997 Goya Award-winning director Eduardo Mignogna and the promising young Spanish actress Ingrid Rubio caught the press's attention (Villena 1998; Rivera 1998; Torreiro 1998). Highly favoured by the presence of renowned cast and crew from both countries, El faro increased the number of spectators of Perdido by almost sevenfold and in 1999 won what was Mignogna's second Goya Award for Best Foreign Film in Spanish. Overshadowed by the presence of Norma Aleandro and the popularity of Rubio, Darín's work eluded the headlines once again.

The complex relationship between acting and stardom depends, according to Barry King, on the mediation of the labour market (1985: 27). Acting as a discursive practice in film and television produces a particular kind of performance strategy that must continually ‘negotiate a way through the forcefield of other practices’ (King 1985: 27). In Richard Dyer's words, in order to become a star those other practices are located ‘at the point of intersection of public demand (the star as a phenomenon of consumption) and producer initiative (the star as a phenomenon of production)’ (1998: 10). While the applicability of the term ‘star’ to both stage and screen performers is contested, it is widely accepted among actors that ‘stage acting provides a yardstick against which to evaluate acting on screen’ (King 1985: 28). Darín himself is of this opinion. For him, ‘theatre is the place of resistance for the actor. It provides time to experiment, research, to make mistakes, and it is there where great things are created’ [‘El teatro es un lugar de resistencia del actor. Aquí hay tiempo para experimentar, investigar, para la equivocación, donde nacen cosas muy buenas’] (quoted in Paredes 2019).

King further explored this assumption that it is on the stage that the actor is best placed to realise her/his creative potential as a result of multiple factors, including the performer's desire to be associated with an ‘elite institution’ – the ‘great’ tradition of the stage – and the claim of the profession's autonomy (1985: 28). With respect to this he said that ‘it is in the theatre that actors have the greatest degree of direct control over the signifying direction and grain of their performance – even if this control is only unevenly realised in practice’ (1985: 33). Darín also praises the power of self-control granted by a live performance in front of an audience when he explained that ‘in cinema, in television and in other formats you have the possibility of cutting and doing it again; in theatre you can’t.

Cinema is a product of the emergence of modern life (Benet 2004: 17–34). The mass migration of people from rural to urban areas at the turn of the century brought with it the need to regulate time, space and labour, which promoted new forms of entertainment and leisure (Charney and Schwartz 1995: 3). The development of a mass culture came alongside the fascination for new technologies and modes of representation. What started as a medium to capture time and movement was soon transformed into an art form that had to negotiate its place among – and in connection to – other popular cultural practices, such as theatre, music and fine art. Longer film strips enabled the creation of more complex stories and the configuration of an institutional mode of representation (Bürch 1991). The turn to fiction as a leading film product (Thompson and Bordwell 2019: 20), and the need to increase the respectability of film, generated a discourse on acting in film that heightened its status to that of the already highly regarded stage acting (Shail 2019: 3). The development of a general cinematic language included the exploration of continuity effects and the regular use of close-up shots where facial expression started to prevail over physical gesticulation to enhance argument development (Gubern 1994). As has been demonstrated by various scholars (deCordova 1991; Shail 2019; Lusnich 1996), all these formal changes, in serving to give film performers more visibility, are part of the foundations of a ‘star system’.

The star phenomenon was not only an outcome of new representational regulations, aesthetic improvements and cutting-edge discourses on acting and art quality, but also of the professionalisation of the production and consumption processes of motion pictures. In the first decade of the twentieth century, different film industries started to flourish across the globe. The United States became dominant, as it had the largest market, with more theatres per capita than any other country (Thompson and Bordwell 2019: 17). It was there where film production companies realised that the star image was an important source of economic value (McDonald 2000: 118). The shifted status of film as commodity meant that the filmed body was ‘established as a site of textual productivity’ (deCordova 1991: 50), not ‘just a source of labour but also a form of capital’ (McDonald 2000: 10).

Appendix 2

As discussed in previous chapters, television and film stardom have been defined in opposition, generally undervaluing the former for the sense of familiarity it generates with the star instead of the distance produced by film (Leppert 2018; Bennett 2011; Ellis 1991; Langer 1981). But the ordinary/extraordinary binary that has thus far defined these forms of stardom (Dyer 2001: 89) is slowly becoming obsolete. Both the changing nature of television and film regimes in the new on-demand virtual culture and the expansion of social media platforms have undermined the notion of stars as unreachable figures, altering the mediated identities that are promoted, consumed and commodified (see Chapter 11 for further discussion of this issue). Back in the 1980s and 1990s, before the impact of the internet and social media, the interplay between star text and star character depended to a great extent on mediated discourses that were less volatile and more impersonal than those allowed by today's media. Star comedians were generally typecast, and mainstream media rarely constructed a star text that moved them away from the specific significance of their comedy roles.

Generally speaking, comedy stardom can be fairly idiosyncratic (Patterson 2012: 232). It blurs the boundaries of the above-mentioned ordinary/extraordinary opposition that tended to dissociate television and film stardom. The case of Argentine comedians Alberto Olmedo and Jorge Porcel, for instance, demonstrate how the extraordinary can be ordinary. In spite of having thirty-six films to their credit – between 1973 and 1988 (Fidanza 2019) – and their undeniable popularity, they were never really defined as film stars by scholars and critics. This is due to several factors: their films were generally regarded as low-brow; their constant participation in other media, including variety shows, radio and television, created a sense of familiarity with the performers that was removed from the unattainable aura generated by traditional film stardom; and they tended to play variations on the same characters that were constructed with a television performance criteria in mind (López 2005: 610–619). Darín's comedy stardom, however, as will be discussed in the following sections, demonstrates how the perceived ordinariness of comedy and television performance can coexist with and inform the alleged extraordinariness of film stardom, if performers are willing to take risks and move beyond the characters that define them when they are at the peak of their celebrity status.

In his seminal work on Stardom in Latin America, John King states that ‘there is critical consensus that we can speak of stars in the 1930s and 1940s. The case is not clearly made for actors or actresses after, say, the mid-1950s’ (2003: 148). In this vein, he further questions ‘whether the term “star” is the right one to use for the many prominent actors working in national cinemas throughout the region in the past fifty years’ (2003: 148). While there is no longer a managed or vertical system as used to be the case in Argentina during the Golden Age – hence the challenges of talking about a ‘star system’ in the region today – undoubtedly there are still a number of figures who possess a set of extraordinary qualities that single them out for stardom and distinguish them from other film performers (Shingler 2012: 90–91). In general, those qualities have been defined as sitting within the realm of ‘glamour, charisma, and desire’ (Qiong Yu 2017: 1; Shingler 2012: 90–91). Yet, as recent studies on Cult Film Stardom (Egan and Thomas 2013), Ageing Stars (Swinnen and Stotesbury 2012) and the expansion and transformation of Star Studies (Qiong Yu and Austin 2017) demonstrate, there exist different types of stardom that do not necessarily involve those characteristics.

With the aim of offering an expanded contemporary notion of stardom, Susan Hayward (2006) suggests that the star ‘is representative of both normality and “acceptable” excess’ (Qiong Yu 2017: 3). The actors and actresses who will be in focus in what follows negotiate the tension between these poles and, to paraphrase Qiong Yu, they ‘[highlight] the performativity of Stardom’ (2017: 19). Informed by the ‘polycentric vision’ proposed by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994/2014) in their groundbreaking monograph Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, this chapter moves away from a Hollywood-centric approach that would locate Latin American and, more specifically, Argentine Stardom, in the periphery – or as ‘non-stardom’. As they state, ‘the world has many dynamic cultural locations, many possible vantage points’ and ‘no single community or part of the world, whatever its economic or political power, should be epistemologically privileged’ (2014: 48).

Television was imported from the USA to Argentina in 1951 by media tycoon Jaime Yankelevich, who made a deal with the government to broadcast the first transmission on 17 October, as part of the national commemoration day known as ‘Loyalty Day’, which marks Perón's release from prison in the wake of massive labour strikes and the origin of Peronism (Taquini and Trilnick 1993: 11). The fact that Darín appeared in a TV programme for the first time just a few years after this date, when he was still a baby, makes him a true ‘television native’, who has observed almost literally from the cradle the challenges that the new medium represented for established actors and actresses (Valdéz 2011). By the time he reached his twenties, he had spent most of his life in television studios and was very comfortable in that environment, surpassing any of the challenges experienced by his predecessors. It was in those years, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, when he became a TV celebrity, and when his small-screen fame and personality started to feed into his film and theatre performances. In relation to this should also be noted – as Tierney, Ruétalo and Ortiz do in their study on new Latin American Stardom (2017) – the important role played by television in determining stardom in national contexts. And, as they correctly explain, ‘this is particularly the case’ when it comes to ‘Latin American television's most popular format, the telenovela’ (2017: 165).

Most performers in Latin America who have reached a high level of public recognition and have crossed over to become big film stars have passed through the rite of passage of telenovelas. In recent decades, with the upsurge of Latino demographics in the USA, this tendency has also had a strong impact in Hollywood. In 2013, NBC Latino reporter Nina Terrero explained that ‘over the last ten years, novela exports from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and other Latin American countries have dominated the U.S. Hispanic television market, creating an avenue for scheming villains, lovelorn hunks and poor maids to become Hollywood heavyweights’.

Over the past two decades, Ricardo Darín has become the most famous actor in Argentina, and yet his star persona remains unexplored in both Hispanic and Anglophone academia. His name is synonymous with commercial success within the national film industry, so much so that he plays himself in Delirium (Kaimakamian 2014), a film which focuses – in a self-reflexive and parodical way – on two amateur filmmakers who are convinced that Darín's presence in their first feature film will guarantee its resounding triumph and make them rich. In that same comic vein, in 2015 a Brazilian film blog invented the news that the Argentine Minister of Culture was considering sponsoring a film without Darín as part of the cast (Cacofonias 2015). Even though these two examples exaggerate Darín's role in the dynamics of the local film industry, it cannot be denied that he has become a regular presence in most mainstream Argentine productions and a key economic factor in the definition and shaping of popular conceptions of national identity and film culture.

Although his success has been mainly circumscribed to Spanish-speaking countries, his name has been associated with the renewal of Argentine cinema in international film circuits. Darín gained worldwide recognition through Fabián Bielinsky's Nueve reinas [Nine Queens] (2000) and Juan José Campanella's El hijo de la novia [The Son of the Bride] (2001). In 2010, the film El secreto de sus ojos [The Secret in their Eyes] (Campanella 2009), starring Darín, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of that year. Some Hollywood offers followed these successes – which he rejected, claiming that he does not have the intention of falling into stereotypical ‘Latino’ roles. Thanks to the release of the film Relatos salvajes [Wild Tales] (Szifrón 2014), he also gained significant attention in UK media. When reviewing this film for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw (2015) recognised that: ‘Ricardo Darín is the film's big star name’, in spite of the cast being populated with some of the most internationally renowned Argentine film performers of the past decades, such as Leonardo Sbaraglia, Darío Grandinetti and Óscar Martínez.

Darín's international stardom is in many respects a contested construction. The question that persists in Star Studies is whether star consecration necessarily involves Hollywood's recognition or not. Leah Kemp, whilst insisting that Darín cannot be compared to Gael García Bernal in international reach, begins her analysis of stardom in Spanish America with the assumption that Darín is a star, and by trying to demonstrate that ‘the perception of Hollywood as a sort of finish-line in the race to stardom’ (2017: 38) for Hispanic American actors needs to be challenged when considering how the global south operates. Albeit a promising start, she eventually concludes (with some nuances) that indeed it is participation in Hollywood films that makes these actors transnational stars (2017: 46). When discussing Darín's transnational recognition, Nahuel Ribke and Jerome Bourdon arrive at a similar conclusion, privileging the use of the term ‘peripheral stardom’ when talking about stars outside the Hollywood system who transcend their own cultural specificity. They further explain that ‘peripheral stardom cannot have the global or international reach of Hollywood stardom and is dependent on specific reception processes in various geopolitical areas, while simultaneously influencing the self-image of the nation of origin’ (2017: 713).

Contrasting these assumptions, Darín has eluded working in the giant of the north and yet, as discussed in the previous chapter, it cannot be denied that his star status goes beyond his country of origin. Therefore, instead of looking at Darín as a ‘peripheral star’, or as having appeal only to Spanish-speaking audiences, this chapter aims to explore his international and transnational reach by considering that other centres exist within the Western world and that it is possible to talk about ‘stars’ beyond a Hollywood-centric and even Eurocentric perspective.

There are conceptual blurrings between the terms ‘global’, ‘transnational’ and ‘international’ which ought to be considered when exploring Darín's transnational mobility and cross-cultural exchanges. Nataša Durovicová has marked a distinction between ‘global’ – a category that implies totality – ‘international’, whose prefix implies a sort of parity between nations, and ‘transnational’, which acknowledges the agency of the state but where the prefix implies both unevenness and mobility (2010: ix–x).

The Revolución Libertadora [Liberating Revolution]'s 1955 coup d’état put an end to Perón's government and its Peronist star system. Many of the iconic artists from the period, such as Hugo del Carril, Tita Merello and Zully Moreno, were persecuted and had to live in exile (Mazzaferro 2018: 120). After years of lack of investment in new equipment, new talents and foreign distribution, the industry suffered another crisis (Maranghello 2005: 114). The production of low-cost films for general entertainment which moved away from a rich cinematographic local tradition resulted in Argentine cinema losing its influence in Latin American markets and, therefore, many studios had to close their doors (Maranghello 2005: 114). This closure was also the outcome of the annulment of the Peronist Film Law, which up until this point had supported the industry by granting a screen quota to national productions and by offering various forms of subsidies to the sector (Kriger 2009: 91).

Even once the witch-hunt of Peronist supporters in the industry diminished, there were some artists who never recovered – such as Fanny Navarro (Posadas 1994: 236). With the disarticulation of the domestic show business came a renewed focus on foreign stars and their systems – mainly from Hollywood and Europe (Mazzaferro 2018: 120). By 1958, when elections were called once more, most of the covers of Antena magazine were dedicated to foreign performers. Local figures such as Mirtha Legrand, Mecha Ortiz, Laura Hidalgo and Lolita Torres had to share their spotlight with Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Anita Ekberg and Gina Lollobrigida (Mazzaferro 2018: 138). As these names suggest, at an international level the 1950s saw the transformation of film stars into glamorised objects charged with sex appeal. The crisis in Hollywood studios brought with it an exacerbation of the stars’ features more than the restructuring of the stellar model (Mazzaferro 2018: 152). This was particularly the case for female stars, whose bodies became the centre of attention of the industry.

Appendix 1