Italian Contemporary Screen Performers. Training, Production, Prestige

This volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the multilayered professional role of film and television actors and actresses within the contemporary Italian screen media landscape. More precisely, by focusing on a carefully thought-out selection of Italian film and television stars that have reached success from 2000 onwards, the volume underscores how the renewal that the Italian media industry has undergone starting from the late 1990s has impacted the training, recruitment, career manage-ment, promotion and PR, and validation strategies of this category of media professionals. While the generation of stars that since the postwar era had been making Italian cinema world-renowned disappeared— together with that mode of production—new cohorts of actresses and actors who required different skills and mediators came to the fore. This edited collection is informed by the four-year-long research project F-ACTOR. Forms of Contemporary Media Professional Acting. Training, Recruitment and Management, Social Discourses in Italy (2000– 2020), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, which adopted a cutting-edge methodological framework that conflates estab-lished performance studies and stardom/celebrity studies together with media production studies. The volume brings to the foreground how since 2000 the various stages of the professional life cycle of an Italian leading actor or actress have changed. To this end, the edited collection is divided into three parts that correspond to as many crucial aspects in the professional life cycle of a film and television actor or actress: training and early career paths; career management; promotion and vali-dation strategies. More precisely, aside from a substantive theoretical and methodological introduction, the book comprises a series of chap-ters, authored by specialists in Italian film and television studies based in Italy, the UK, and the US. Each chapter focuses on a well-known Italian actor, actress, or related professional, whose creative and operational abil-ities and career pathway best epitomize one of the peculiarities of the professional development of contemporary Italian screen stars.