Ideas - The origins of celebrity, from medieval divas to Kris Jenner

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

From Joan of Arc to Kim Kardashian, and Davy Crockett to Donald Trump, celebrity culture has deep and wide roots. Famous people who elicited Kardashian-level feelings of love and hate in the public were present centuries ago — long before screens and social media. Though, as we find out in this podcast, they all share similar qualities. *This episode originally aired on June 30, 2022.Irina Dumitrescu is a writer, co-host of the LRB podcast Encounters with Medieval Women, and a professor of Medieval English at the University of Bonn.Sharon Marcus is author of The Drama of Celebrity and the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally secured a majority for this liberal government. What are his plans and how does it all affect you? The Power and Politics Podcast answers these questions and more six days a week. We have you covered from all angles. Our reporter roundtable joins us every Friday and you can get caught up with the weekly wrap every Saturday. Follow and listen to Power and Politics wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Okay, the first celebrity I remember liking was Charles Chaplin.

And the reason was he made me laugh and he moved like a dancer. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Think back. Who is the very first star to catch your attention? The person who created Pokemon, Pikachu. Lucille Ball. Serena Williams, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt. Hannah Montana slash Miley Sires. Diana Ross and the Supremes.

The answer depends on your age and location, of course. And whether you grew up with stage and screen or YouTube and TikTok. The first celebrity that I got into was probably Lily Singh, probably because she is both a brown woman and from Toronto, someone who's like myself in the influencer space. Young or older, it may surprise you to know that no matter how far back your celebrity memories go, they don't extend all the way back. It's an ancient proposition.

In Greece and Rome, there were athletes and playwrights who won competitions. Their statues were put up in every small town on every single town on every. Island and people knew their names and they talked about them and they knew who they were. On this episode, the centuries-old roots of celebrity. The most important relationship is the one between the celebrity and the public. You cannot have a celebrity without people who are interested in them. It doesn't exist. Finding the parallels between past and present and the qualities that have made celebrity endure.

Swatonius writes a book about the 12 Caesars, about 2,000. years ago, and what is he talking about? Sex scandals. Why did this divorce happen? Let's peek behind the curtain of these venerable rulers and look at what's really going on. It's a very old impulse. While celebrity seems trivial and mere distraction, we live in an era where attention equals clout.

From Trump to Zelensky, celebrities can become world leaders. So we can think what we want about the nature of celebrity, but it's important. It's extremely powerful in our lives. And I don't think we can ignore it, really. Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey takes this look into the origins of celebrity. Is the sound of fandom.

People gathering in a New York alley waiting for a green-haired pop star coming out of a talk show appearance. It's Billy Island. and some are shouting in excitement as she stops to chat and give hugs. Others are booing because she's not signing autographs. Who does she think she is? This scene from 2019 might just encapsulate what makes celebrity celebrity.

In my view, a celebrity is someone who gives her or his public an opportunity to feel strong emotions. While fame is an important quality, it's about the connection to the celebrity that the audience feels, whether it's followers, fans of the celebrity, or even people who hate the celebrity, the celebrity gives us a chance to feel strong things. Hi, my name's Irina Domitresco. I'm a professor of medieval English literature at the University of Bonn. And co-host of the Unexpectedly Juicy Podcast Encounters with Medieval Women. I'm fascinated by medieval divas. That's an unexpected phrase because when we think of celebrity culture, we're thinking of something, what, a century old at most, but? Because I think the intimacy is so important, that relationship between the person who is viewing, spectating, watching, commenting, adoring, criticizing, and the celebrity. I think we can find a history for that earlier.

And the most obvious place to find it is in the cult of saints, which starts in late antiquity and develops over the Middle Ages to be quite powerful. Saints were like today's stars both very far away, celestial beings, a little bit divine and out of reach. And at the same time, people with whom one could have a direct and intimate connection. Like that nice Taylor Swift. So relatable. So I got a new cat. Yeah. Or is she?

If you had a superpower, what would it be? Healing people. You know, you have people who have their patron saints or might pray to a certain saint in a particular moment in their life. You know, say you pray to Margaret when you're pregnant for a special protection. You have people who travel to see the relics of saints the way today people will travel to visit Graceland or to see a dress that belong to Princess Diana.

So the sense of connecting to something that's higher than us, and yet still accessible, yet still somehow touchable and human, that was already there in the cult of saints. And I think modern celebrity essentially just builds on top of that. It's the same urges that are being satisfied by different people. Our definition of celebrity is pretty broad and quite democratic. Are you a cheerful guy living in the Yukon who likes to make Bangra dance videos? You're in.

Along with that Instagram model with the giant eyebrows who teaches us how to apply concealing. More people can aspire to celebrity today. But it must have been different in medieval times. The bar to become a saint is pretty high. You know, you do have ordinary people like Marjorie Kemp who is trying to be like a saint in her own time. So it's not unheard of that somebody would try to become well-known as an extraordinary person, a semi-divine person even in her own time.

Marjorie does that she has these conversations with God and God tells her, I will make you famous, you know. He basically promises her she will be able to act like a saint. Quite the manager. But Marjorie is extraordinary in her time. A middle class woman who lived in England in the 14th and 15th centuries, and after a traumatic childbirth and postpartum disorder, she started having visions from God.

And this led her on a path of notoriety, really, because there were many people who did not believe that she was having. these visions. She would weep dramatically and dress in white and not eat meat and went on many pilgrimages and so on. Unscripted TV didn't exist back then, but if it did, this one might have got an audition. Most important for our topic, she would talk about herself all of the time and the visions she was having. She tried to sort of spread the word about her holiness in every way she could, mostly to the annoyance of the people around her. Some believed her and some some actually, you know, went to her for comfort.

So she's this interesting figure of someone who is an ordinary woman. She doesn't succeed in becoming a saint. But certainly some scholars now believe she was trying for sainthood. She was modeling herself on recent historical saints like St. Burgud. She was modeling herself on Mary Magdalene. She was trying to have a close relationship with the Virgin Mary in these visions that she was having. but she fails in becoming a proper saint. So she's someone who becomes notorious in her own time

and famous in her own time, but nothing beyond that. But at least she avoids having her story turned into a 1973 movie musical with a 42% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And in his innocence, he made a world where only truth was sacred. Poor St. Francis of Assisi. We know how we know about saints like St. Francis,

but how did words spread in the Middle Ages, a time not associated with a 24-7 media cycle or lightning-fast 5G networks. But this is the funny thing. We tend to feel like fame travels very fast today, and we talk about technology as being responsible for this. But the funny thing is, people have always felt that fame traveled very fast. Even when it was just through people talking to

each other or people writing letters or people spreading the news in various ways, Virgil in the Aeneid has this description at one point of the monster, Fama. And Fama and Latin can mean both fame and rumor. And this monster essentially flies at night. There's a sense of incredible swiftness to fame. And I find this in all kinds of texts from the ancient and medieval period, this sensation that fame moves so fast, but they're talking about people gossiping. That's really how it worked. So even in the 14th century, Jeffrey Chaucer, the great poet of English literature, has a poem called The House of Fame. And in that, it's through trumpets. Trumpets blare out from the House of Fame and spread people's reputation all over the world

faster than anyone can do anything about it. So even though they didn't have the technology we do. They still had this feeling of rumor traveling quickly and with the reputations being built up or being torn down in what felt like a flash. Overnight success and a cancel culture, 14th century style. Actually, when you look at people writing about fame in the Middle Ages, they have a much more critical perspective on it. When Chaucer reaches the House of Fame in the third book of that poem, he actually gets to see fame sitting and judging on people's reputations. And these groups of people come up, some are evil, some are good, some are nothing at all. And they ask for different kinds of fame.

Some want good fame, some want bad fame, someone to be forgotten altogether. And she sometimes gives them what they want, and she sometimes doesn't give them what they want at all. Sometimes good people get a bad reputation and bad people get a good reputation. Some people who just want to be private are remembered forever and others are forgotten. And the point is that fame is fickle. there's no logic to it. And Chaucer knew this, and I think his audience would have known this. How you're perceived in the public sphere,

how you're perceived by history, has really nothing to do with how you actually were when you were alive. Since we live longer now, there's a chance that your reputation can be positively revised while you're still alive. Take the recent change of heart around Britney Spears. Giovanni Boccaccio is known today for the Decameron, but he also wrote a text about famous women,

where he actually wrote one on famous men and one on famous women. And the famous women are a real mix. Some are goddesses, some are heroic women, noble women who are admirable, and some are quite bad. And he says at the beginning, I've mixed them up because we can learn from both examples. But you also have cases like the ancient queen Semiramis, who is great on the battlefield. She fights like a man, but then she has an incestuous relationship. I guess medieval celebs didn't have crisis management teams on call, or did they? He has a story about a woman who's a prostitute and entertainer. And when she dies, she leaves behind money for games to be celebrated in Rome with lots of lewd, lascivious behavior and so on.

And the Romans love these games, but eventually they clean them up and they decide to turn her into a goddess. And she basically goes down in history as of goddess. but she started out as a kind of woman of the stage with everything that meant at the time. So it's a perfect celebrity situation. Some celebrities today make grittiness part of their brand. Former exotic dancer turned rapper Cardi B. Former exotic dancer turned actor Channing Tatum. And all those lovable guys with super scary criminal pasts.

That tension can all be a part of celebrity charisma. Already Bocacho was playing. Playing with the fact that illustrious people, famous people, are never that easy to categorize. Fame isn't just about good deeds or noble achievements. It's always kind of a mix. And some of his characters actually can change their reputation through canny marketing, brand management. So I think people knew about this even back then because they were thinking about fame and reputation so intensely. And human nature hasn't changed in this respect, right?

Rumors aren't always accurate. Tradition isn't always accurate. And they understood this, that you could become very famous and admired on nothing at all. Worse, some become well known through terrible anti-social acts. Chaucer mentions...

The fourth century arsonist named Herostratus, who burned down the temple of Artemis simply to become famous. You know, reminds me always of John Lennon's murderer, this idea that, someone would want fame so badly they would do something horrible to attain it. He says he regrets causing so many people so much pain and has since found Jesus.

Quote, that bright light of fame of infamy, notoriety was there. I couldn't resist it. So I think there is this sense in the Middle Ages that this is one thing to which people can resort, particularly horrible people, can try to become famous simply by being destructive on an epic scale. Some celebrities now speak about the trade-offs of fame, the threats and dangers for sure, but also the loss of self and privacy. Once I cross that property line, I'm not free anymore. As soon as I go out into the world, I belong in a way to everyone else. Lady Gaga might resonate with the memoir of Peter Abelard. He talks about being famous in Paris and in 12th century Paris. And he is not just famous,

for being an intellectual, he's also famous because he's a great composer of love songs. So he's kind of a rock star intellectual bad boy of his time. All the women are in love with him. The 12th century scholar whose age inappropriate affair with his brilliant student, Eloise, led to big trouble and a timeless collection of passionate love letters. And he falls in love with Heloise because she's famous for her learning. It's Brangelina, these two famous figures who essentially fall for each other. And when Abelard famously is castrated by Eloise's family members, his greatest suffering is not the physical injury. It's the shame. It's the fact that the whole city has come to watch him suffer and be mutilated. So attracting crowds,

attracting attention, being very interested in the management of their reputation, having a sense that their reputation has a power all of its own, that their image has developed into something that's beyond their capacity to control or to manipulate. Which again echoes with our own time. I have been very carefully for research reasons watching keeping up with the Kardashians from the first season. I'm somewhere around season 10. And you can see them becoming more famous and coming into the power of their fame, not in the sense that they have more power, but they are also controlled by their fame.

And they can sometimes see the fame destroying them or hurting them, and yet they cannot escape it, because fame. is what they have. Be careful what you wish for. Then, as now. Some stumble into celebrity. Others seek it out. They crave the power it confers.

Eleanor Racketaine was the queen of France and then of England. She is sometimes... I wrote a piece about Eleanor Rackettain and how she resembles Chris Jenner. Please tell us about that. Eleanor Vacotane was a high-born and powerfully born and well-educated woman who was the Queen of France and Queen of England and the mother of two kings of England. She placed her daughters in all brilliant marriages around the continent. She's sometimes considered to have been responsible for the rise of courtly love through her patronage of Troobadors.

that's a little bit debated, but she certainly seems to have been culturally very active and politically active. And she reminds me a great deal of Chris Jenner because she's also one of these people who really used her children as pawns in her attempt to gain and consolidate power in very pointed ways.

I think this is one of the reasons Chris Jenner is so disturbing to people today. She operates like a medieval queen. What inspired you to become a momager? Well, I think it just evolved from when we started filming the show, and things happened really fast. You are the executive producer of the show, but they give you $150 million, and it's up to you to dole out who gets what. Is that right? Well, not exactly. No, I think it's kind of a group decision, and I'm lucky if I get paid. You know, if she had lived in the 12th century or 13th century, she would have been fine. And Eleanor Vakotane founded churches, really did everything that a powerful queen.

would do, Christ Jenner has also helped found the church, by the way. So there's a sense of extremely powerful, influential, meddlesome woman who is both admired and hated in and after her time. So the celebrity of the 12th century can be as complicated and colorful and flawed as those of our own time. So who gets Irina Dumatrescu's vote as the quintessential medieval celebrity? I think it's Joan of Arc. To me, Joan of Arc seems like a perfect diva figure. And I think that's why Joan of Arc has had such a long history, why people keep going back to her. She's become a national symbol for France. She's a great subject for film. And partly it was her youth, the fact that she was

female, the fact that she was transgressive. She dressed in men's clothes. That's often, the sense of transgressing against social norms is something that we find among celebrities like Sarah Bernard, you know, in the 19th century actress. This is very typical for them. Madonna, right? Joan had conversations with saints. She had a divine connection. She was sometimes considered to have been a witch.

We must be absolutely certain that she is not an instrument of the devil. The girl is crazy. We are, of course, enormously grateful for your past efforts. But now your task is done. I want that girl. Burn. And I think Joan is one of these interesting figures who draws so much hatred and admiration. And to me, that's really the mark of many celebrities.

It's that people feel strongly about her one way or another, that it's hard not to have any kind of feeling about her. And of course, she's martyred, which is also useful for developing that kind of long-lasting legend. And, you know, we know that from the 20th century, the great stars of the 20th century like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. whose early deaths fix them in our popular imagination. Still, there are differences. Modern celebrity is much more pervasive. I think we now live in a time where the sheer quantity of celebrity at every level, icons, stars, reality show, personalities, Instagram influencers, what have you.

We have so many different levels of people who are prominent or trying to be prominent and jostling for our attention, that there's little space outside of them. So I think that's really the big difference. It's the amount. It's the amount. And the technology does really make a difference then. And who wins when it comes to quintessential celebrity of the 21st century? It has to be Kim Kardashian because Kim Kardashian is only celebrity. She's like the pure essence of celebrity. I think she's a very uncharismatic person, which is interesting. She doesn't have that kind of magnetism that the great stars of 20th century cinema have, or even some stars today or some singers today have. Beyonce, I think, is charismatic.

Kim Kardashian is not. It's not just about the talent. Kim has nothing but that pure celebrity. She chased fame and she got fame. And what's interesting is she's being able to turn fame into other kinds of power as well. More than just the clout to sell products, including yourself, to 316 million Instagram followers. When I was teaching a course on celebrity to my students, my students were very skeptical about the idea of celebrity. I think rightly so, but at one point I said to them, look, right now, this was during the Trump presidency,

there's a man who holds the nuclear codes who could destroy life on this planet and who is in that position because of his celebrity. And we're talking about Kim Kardashian and she can seem like a very shallow person, but she has the ear of that person, of the person who holds the nuclear codes who can allow people to go free from prison, she can get an audience anytime she wants with him because of her celebrity. Today, in the sixth act of executive clemency

of his administration, President Trump commuted her sentence. It came after Kim Kardashian-West lobbied the president on her behalf. Well, I was on set of a photo shoot, and once I got the call from the president on my cell phone, and I knew it was happening, and it was 100% happening, Like, hearing her scream...

That's all right. I understand. It's emotional. I mean, people understand. I mean, I think people might think, like, oh, Kim went to the White House, had this conversation. Daily phone calls with the White House. We can think what we want about the nature of celebrity, but it's important. It's extremely powerful in our lives.

And I don't think we can ignore it, really. Irina Dimitrescu is co-host of the podcast Lives of Medieval Women and is a professor of medieval English at the University of Bonn. You're listening to Ideas and an episode about the origins of celebrity. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.com.

ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered?

What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. If you happen to live in a place where movies and TV shows get made, you might just run into the occasional well-known person. Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey remembers the first time it happened to her. Yeah, so I worked in a bookstore during university in downtown Toronto on a main street and one day this man came in, white guy, brown hair, average height. He looked around.

He came up to the cash eventually with like a coffee table book about cars, I remember. And he seemed American to me because he was looking through his wallet and he couldn't figure out the bills. So we helped him and he paid and he left. And my colleague turned to me and said, oh my God, do you know who that was? Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Cruise! It was Tom Cruise. And I didn't recognize him at all because he didn't have a bodyguard. He wasn't wearing that, hey, don't look at me. I'm a celebrity kind of outfit with the ball cap and the sunglasses and all that, which just makes you look at people harder. Anyway, he just looked like an average guy. He looked like a regular human being. That's probably because Tom Cruise is human. Rich, eccentric, and Oscar-nominated, true, but flesh and blood. So what makes him a starry other to millions around the world,

a source of fascination and strong emotions from adoration to anger? It's not just the effects of the modern entertainment business. Throughout the centuries, scholars tell us, people have been enthralled to the famous. This next part of the episode, Origins of Celebrity, explores why. You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers.

I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. Tom Cruise was one of my first star sightings and maybe the biggest, but I've seen my share of in-person celebrities since. Some really do glow with exceptional beauty. Others have extraordinary skills or talents. Some have charisma. But in person, without designer clothes and a roaring crowd around them,

they often kind of shrink down to street level. They're just aversion. of us. It's almost as if they need to be mediated in some way to have their celebrity superpowers activated. Celebrity is often thought of as a product. Oh, here's a celebrity, but really celebrity is a process. I'm Sharon Marcus. I'm a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. And I'm the author of the drama of celebrity published by Princeton University Press in 2019. She sees a share of shifting complex exchange at work around the creation of celebrity, a kind of triangle between the

person, the public, and the media. Take the case of the people's princess. The royal family, apart from Princess Diana was known for trying to maintain as much privacy and dignity as possible. One of the reasons Deanna was controversial as a royal, and by all accounts, a bit pesky within the royal family, is that she had a very different relationship to the public and to the media. She had a real feel for the public, according to Tina Brown in her really excellent biography of Princess Diana, was partly because Princess Diana was an avid reader of tabloids herself that she understood how to present herself to the tabloids and reach the public that read the tablet. Although obviously much wealthier and more privileged than the majority of Britons understood them and shared their interests, she didn't really see herself as that set apart from them.

She had that ability, much remarked on, to reach people emotionally. She had a really good sense of playing to the camera, of creating drama. What evidence did you have that their relationship was continuing, even though you were married? A woman's instinct is a very good one. Do you think Mrs. Parker Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage? Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. Even after she died, you could see in the response to her death, how the public is very much a driver of celebrity, even in an age where the media has a really strong role. This is before social media, before Twitter.

You know, we have newspapers doing the job of the press, which is to decide what is and isn't news. But they can't ignore it when hundreds of thousands of people to send on the, London. I thought it was just going to be quiet sobs and quiet being English. That's what we do, isn't it? We don't show emotion. But then you hit the crowd and that's what I will never forget about the whole thing. You heard that huge scream.

Diana, we love you. It cut right through all of us. You know, you could really see in the story of Princess Diana different moments of celebrity colliding, but what you also see is how there's always a tussle and cooperation, collaboration and competition between the celebrity, the public, and the media. And of course, celebrities might be competing and collaborating with each other, which is what was happening within the royal family. And so to see Harry and Megan really suffer the hands of some of that,

you know, with the stories that were leaked to the press, with the games that went on behind the scenes. During the sit-down, Megan also paid tribute to her late mother-in-law by wearing her diamond tennis bracelet. What do you think your mom would say about this stepping back, this decision to step back? So it's a very complicated dynamic, but in some ways it's also, I think, reducible to these three points. Celebrities, public, and media, they all have power. None has complete power. So it's in their interactions with each other that celebrity emerges.

and you never know what's going to happen. I think that's part of the reason people are so fascinated. We don't know who will become a star, stay a star, what will happen to their reputations, how people will deal with a revelation that comes out. And it's that unpredictability, that suspense and the sense that we contribute to the story ourselves by our own actions that keeps many people riveted to the whole spectacle of celebrity. Sharon Marcus defines celebrity as people. who are known in their lifetimes to more people than can possibly know one another.

So in past centuries, including her specialty, the 19th, celebrity encompassed more than just artists and entertainers. I have some books on my shelf, really beautiful leather-bound volumes heavy with great illustrations that have titles like celebrities of our time. And the figures in them are inventors like Thomas Edison, scientists like Louis Pester, generals like Wellington and Napoleon and Ulysses S. Grant, monarchs, aristocrats. They are authors like Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain. In the 19th century, the majority of people refer to as celebrities were male figures. Often people you would read about in the military or political section of the newspaper. And sometimes the word referred to lasting, durable fame, people who had done great deeds and that would make them live on in history.

And sometimes the word referred to flashes in the pan, minor figures, people known for scandal rather than for something laudable. The word had a very broad, capacious meaning in the 19th century. And I would say it still does. It's a vexed word. A vexed word, but a longstanding concept. Pretty much as old as complex human societies and any technology for representing people. So rulers in Babylonia had triumphal arches and reliefs made depicting them. They were celebrities.

Now, they're not the kind of modern celebrity that we think of today who has become a celebrity because the public shows them. If you have an army behind your back and a bunch of people in your service who really don't have any choice but to put you up on the triumphal arch, it's not celebrity as we think of it now. At the same time, it's an ancient proposition. In Greece and Rome. There were athletes and playwrights who won competitions. Their statues were put up in every small town on every island, and people knew their names, and they talked about them, and they knew who they were. Now we tend to think of these societies as too high crowd to be concerned about these things, but it's really not the case at all. Swatonius writes a book about the 12 Caesars about 2,000 years ago,

And what is he talking about? Sex scandals. Who was sleeping with whom? Why did this divorce happen? Which family member poisoned another? Let's peek behind the curtain of these venerable rulers and look at what's really going on. It's a very old impulse to raise people above others and then to try to bring them down to our level. Celebrity culture of the past really entered a new phase with the industrial era,

the age of mechanical reproduction. All of a sudden, everything had speeded up. So what did this? Electricity, obviously, photography, the telegraph, steamships, railroad travel, improved roads. All of these things start to take off in the 18th century, and they really, really pick up in the 1840s, and by the 1880s, people were living in an entirely different world.

News could travel faster than it ever had. when a famous actress got married in 1880 in London, they knew about it in Paris within an hour. Their interest fed on the increased number of copies and the increased pace of the news, and that led newspapers to cover Celebrity More. And so there was a feedback loop. So there's an explosion that happens starting in the 1840s, and I think Celebrity hasn't really stopped exploding since then. The handsome young senator has a lot to overcome. But the Kennedy campaign has a plan to sell him to the country.

In the realm of modern American politics, the TV era often gets blamed for turning something serious into celebrity and artifice. JFK is prepped for his television appearance. The day before, he met with producers and discussed camera angles. He looks tanned and glowing. Glamorous JFK begets actor-turned president Ronald Reagan, begets Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, begets, you know who. But Sharon Marcus points out that politicians of the 19th century were also visually celebrated.

Parades, figurines and mugs in the image of famous politicians and political leaders, people putting little statues or photographs of the, leaders on their mantelpieces, people dressing like them, people having hero worship for them. All of this starts long before the 20th century. What the 20th century does is it makes this more visible and simultaneous. Many people who break through to become celebrities are iconoclastic, rebels, pathbreakers. People who just say, I'm not like other people, I'm different. I don't follow your rules. That might bring to mind you know who again, but he didn't invent the type. The idea that there'd be these, you know, say like rambunctious, disrespectful figures like Donald Trump. One of the reasons Donald Trump could succeed is that unfortunately that kind of nonsense is baked pretty deep into U.S. cultures.

Take the supposedly all-American folk hero celebrated in a 1950s TV series. the sea. Green is stayed in the land of the three. Raised in the woods so he knew ever tree. Killed him a bar when he was only three. Daisy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. I could tell you the story of Davy Crockett in a way that would make it sound exactly like Donald Trump, someone who kind of comes out of nowhere, brags about his sexual exploits, brags about being a racist, dress is funny, has weird hair, has a ghost-written autobiography that says he's better than he is, says that it sells more copies than it did, keeps running for office and often failing, but then eventually succeeds. You know, it's a kind of U.S.

Hucksterism that has been part of U.S. politics for a very long time. The rebel figure was compelling in 19th century politics and in the arts and entertainment field. A central figure in Sharon Marcus' study of the mold while who came next. Sarah Bernhardt prefigures modern celebrity because she not only was incredibly famous, she understood how celebrity worked. And she worked the system. And so by looking at her, we can understand what that system was. She understood that a great way to appeal to the public was to be both skilled at what she did, which was act,

and make a big show of having a persona in private that defied the rules. The performer known as the Divine Sarah electrified audiences at home in France, and while touring abroad. By most people's agreement for 20 to 30 years, the greatest actress in the world. She was seen also as having an especially good command over her face and her body, as any performer has to, but in this case, people would really remark

on how she was able to act with her entire body. As with actors today, her instrument was the subject of debate. In her day, the 1860s, 70s, 80s, there were still a lot of very limited understandings of how a woman should look, but it was expected that a woman should be super curvy and kind of buxom with very full hips. Bernhardt was the antithesis of a Kardashian bodywise. It was something that shocked and offended the journalists of the day, that this skinny, flat-chested woman had the nerve to play sexy, romantic leads on stage. They didn't think she was worth looking at.

Why did she think she was worth putting herself on stage? So she was very defiant of not necessarily public opinion, but of the critics and of the journalistic gatekeepers. Her confidence in range rivaled Atilda Swinton. In the first decade of her career alone, she played a young male troubadour courting an older woman. She played a blind grandmother in ancient Rome. So she picked good roles, I think, is another thing that was a very important piece of her talent and her savvy as a performer.

Like a 19th century Beyonce, Bernhardt was at once a talent, a business mind, and a smart self-promoter, who drew the public's attention on stage and off. She was sort of shamelessly doing things. that most people were supposed to be ashamed of, like having an illegitimate child. And she said, no, you know, here I am. She went to parties and had with her son, her teenage son, and had herself announced as Mademoiselle, which was a way of throwing in people's face that she was an unmarried mother. When she visited the United States, a minister took it upon himself to give a sermon denouncing her for being a shameless pussy, basically.

And when she was asked what she thought about that, she said, well, if my child had been a priest's child, he would have no doubt been drowned at birth, which was pretty tough on her part. Today's celebrities swarm onto every emerging social media platform, and Sarah Bernhardt used the new technologies of her day. She understood that modern celebrity would be very dependent on photography. Every time she visited a new place, she would go to the leading photographer in that town and make sure that he almost always, he would photograph her so that her photograph could be sold

in the many stationary shops in every city that sold photographs for a pretty small fee. She went to visit Thomas Edison in 1881 in Menlo Park so that she could have her voice recorded on his newfangle phonograph recording machine because she understood how important that would be. And though many of them are lost today, she made hundreds of films because she understood how important film would be, both in elevating the art of acting by creating a permanent record of great performances and extending celebrity. Looking at celebrity across the centuries, you notice that it somehow accommodates many kinds of people by dint of their talent, luck, determination, or a combination of those things. Sharon Marcus sees a paradox in that and a complication. Just because a few women are put into a 19th century book about celebrities of our time and praised for their great talent as dancers and actors did not mean that women were given the vote.

Those famous women were seen as exceptions. So the way that celebrity combines the representative and the exceptional needs. that you can really take whatever position you want. Oh, I'll admire this person, but that doesn't mean that I change my opinion about the group they belong to. I think there's also sometimes been a certain exoticizing and fetishization of people in non-dominant groups where like, oh, well, of course I want to see that person like make a spectacle of themselves or dress up and perform for me because, you know, I have a kind of weird, currian interest in that group. And that's another reason I think that we've seen at a time when there's been intense racial discrimination and

barriers, you could still have people from oppressed groups become celebrities. And if you speak up, there are consequences. What really becomes challenging is when people want to use their celebrity to create change, to promote more justice and break down barriers. People who set that as the goal, who want to use their celebrity to create change and to change people's minds, encounter a lot of resistance. Arthur Ash, Muhammad Ali, Stevie Wonder, Arita Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald. These are all figures who, in their own lives and careers, sometimes only,

and sometimes as spokespeople, really helped to break down segregation. Muhammad Ali spoke out against the war in Vietnam and refused to serve during the peak years when he could have been boxing and winning championships. And I think that that kind of celebrity activism in concert with mass protests against the Vietnam War, it's an important and brave and powerful statement. It has been said that I have two alternatives, either go to jail or go to the army.

But I would like to say that there is another alternative. And that alternative, that alternative is justice. Hey guys and welcome back to my channel. So I'm doing a bit of a different video today, but it is something that I always get asked in like my DMs and how to be an influencer, how to make an impact. I know it's very saturated at the moment.

With social media and its attention economy, today's celebrity culture welcomes in more people than ever before. So has that leveled off the piece? of old school celebrity? I don't think that social media has flattened celebrity. I think I agree with the people who say that social media has created a lot of niche celebrities and microcelebrities. But I think now we have a lot of celebrities who are known to a million people,

who plenty of people have never heard of. Now, obviously, if you're known to a million people, you're a celebrity. There's no arguing about that. But to see that and to have that made so visible to us is kind of, of strange. And so rather than flattening, I think we have this very, like, bumpy terrain of what celebrity is, where you could, you know, land on some kind of alpine peak and be one of the few people like Adele that everyone's heard of or heard, no matter how old or young they are or where they live. And then you can be an Italian rapper with four million followers who is

completely unknown, like a true non-entity to most people. I think that's interesting, but I would call it bumpy, not flat. The cultural celebrity has lately experienced another kind of bumpiness, too. A new chapter. That's what Ellen promised today. This summer, there were allegations of a toxic work environment at our show. So in this video that TMZ obtained, you can hear Wallin using the N-word. Louis C.K. has spoken out about the sexual misconduct allegations against him, saying the claims are true.

The Oscar-winning actor is facing a series of sexual assault allegations by three different men. Breaking news, we now have a sentence in the Bill Cosby's sexual assault case. The truth is, I am that person that you see on TV. Liar, hypocrite. That's my reaction. Does power corrupt, or do the corrupt seek power? Are damaged people drawn to fame, or does fame damage people? All of that, possibly. It's tarnished too many recent stars to mention, and it makes you consider what ugliness might have been hidden from public view in the past.

So, celebrities are human, woefully so at times. They've been fallible all along from antiquity to the present moment. Scandal and shame is part of the story of celebrity. So, no offense to the stars, but reputation, legacy, that's on them. What's more interesting and enduring is the way that we create meaning for ourselves out of celebrity culture. Sharon Marcus does that now for a living in her work as a researcher, but she started young. One of my earliest loves as a child was of movies and particularly old movies. I know I grew up in a time period and a place, New York City, where there were classic Hollywood movies on TV.

from 11 o'clock in the morning until 11 o'clock at night. And my father really loved movies, and we'd watch a lot of them together. And I think it also helped me negotiate some of the contradictions of being a little girl in the 70s where on the one hand I was being told, I could do anything, I should aim high, I should be independent, of course they should have a job.

And the message was still pretty clear, what matters most is how pretty you are and how much you can impress people with your looks and your charm and your grace. So I think these figures like Barbara Stanwyk, Vivian Lee, Catherine Hepburn, Betty Davis, they really helped me resolve some of those conflicting messages. Good morning, Mr. Hurlark. Good morning. Do you believe in equal rights for women?

What? Objection. Ruled. Exception. Beat the Quest, Counsel. Do you believe in equal rights? equal rights for women. I should say not. The defendant challenges this juror for cause. Excuse. They were in their bodies. They were good at expressing themselves through their facial

expressions. They wore fabulous clothes. They had great hair. So clearly they were making it in the looks department, which literally I was being told all the time was all that mattered. I wasn't just making that up. And they got to command a lot of it. attention. It was clear they were doing something that required a lot of courage and skill. Anytime I tried to stand up in front of a class and even recite a poem, I realize this is a kind of scary thing to do. So they seem very powerful and they seem properly feminine. So I think my early interest in celebrity had to do with managing cultural contradictions. And I actually think that's why a lot of people are interested in celebrity, whether you're trying to figure out what sexuality needs,

what's the right way to be a parent, what's the right way to be a spouse, what kind of behavior is acceptable and not acceptable, what's admirable? Celebrity culture is an ongoing debate about whom and what we value, Sharon Marcus says, and some people see no value in it at all. But if you're open to it, sometimes there's a glimpse of the human scale in the larger-than-law. life, something shining and authentic in the artifice. Sometimes it comes from an exceptional person. Sometimes you put it there yourself.

Sumaya Mustafa. The first celebrity, well, I guess I should probably say celebrities that I really, really got into, was probably one direction. Your hand fits in mind like it's made just for me. I was meant to be And I'm joining up the dots With the freckles on your cheeks And it all makes sense to me I was about 10 years old

And like most young girls in the world I was diagnosed with what I think The media labeled as One Direction infection I think the main reason I became so involved In the band And the fan culture surrounding them Was the environment

That the fans and One Direction themselves had created I think I found a sense of belonging and safety in that fandom, which is really all a young girl could ask for. It didn't hurt that they were a bunch of young, attractive, boys who were funny and charismatic, and I think definitely a part of me wanted to be with them. But I think another part of me wanted to actually be them. You've been listening to an episode on The Origins of Celebrity.

You can find more information. information on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Danielle Duval is our technical producer. Ideas senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.