In Mary Desjardins's engaging new study of the remediation of the female star image, the reader is invited to follow the contrasting fortunes of a selection of iconographic names from the cinema and music industries as they transition to television, several of them postmortem. Certain of these, including Lorretta Young and Ida Lupino, made sure as best they could that they controlled the manner of their appearances through ownership or co-ownership of their own production companies. Yet, as Desjardins argues, the metanarrative of the ageing film star, put in play principally by Sunset Boulevard (1950), but reflective of larger social prejudices, always threatened to destabilize their agency. Thus it is Gloria Swanson who not only gazes imperiously from the television frame on the front of this volume, but her Norma Desmond who dictates how these now middle-aged women should be narrativized on the small screen. The two most common models were to be the melodrama and the female Gothic.

Television, of course, not only recycled Hollywood stars in its early talk shows and mini-dramas, but also recycled itself. Bearing this in mind, Desjardins commences her chapter on I Love Lucy (1951–57) with news of its eponymous star's death. Dying was no impediment to Lucille Ball's fame as I Love Lucy played and replayed for decades after her passing. Picking up on a theme she earlier introduced in her discussion of the revelation that the adopted daughter of Loretta Young, Judy Lewis, was Young's natural child with Clark Gable, Desjardins interestingly considers the challenges faced by the families of deceased stars in retaining control over their image. When Lucie Arnaz decided to make a documentary tribute to her parents’ television partnership, she did so, Desjardins suggests, as a fantasy reconstruction of a marriage that had, in reality, gone off the rails many years previously. Not only this, but her fantasy reconstruction collided with CBS's own need to position themselves as the true family within which I Love Lucy belonged. In the end, both “descendants” made their own tributes. When Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, two contrasting versions of her life story appeared, CBS's conventional The Karen Carpenter Story (1989) and Todd Haynes's Superstar (1988), the latter filmed with versions of Barbie dolls. As Desjardins argues, despite their differences, both films sought to explain Carpenter's death in terms of the family melodrama, notably the singer's attempts to separate her body from that of her smothering mother. Another body in decay, albeit for quite different reasons, concludes this study, as Desjardins considers the video artist Joan Braderman's experimental found-footage work, where she incorporates her own ailing body into the prosthetic star body of Elizabeth Taylor.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, television and film studies, archival research, and, of course, star studies, Desjardins has produced a complex assessment of how audiences, media makers, and the stars themselves needed and used television to construct images of self and other that were dependent on the associative history of the image for their effect. In the middle of this, a chapter on Maureen O'Hara's legal tussle with Confidential magazine appears. While this provides the opportunity for an informative analysis of the workings of the tabloid press and the discourse of scandal in the mid-twentieth century, its place in the wider argument of this volume is harder to substantiate. At the same time, a final chapter on new media and the mash-up seems tacked on, and it is tempting to conclude that the author's heart is not in YouTube. These are small quibbles, as is a slight regret that women of colour could not have made a greater impact on the discussion. Overall, Recycled Stars makes an original and sophisticated contribution to film and television studies and will be widely welcomed by readers and teachers. It is also illustrated with a delectable selection of stills that communicate the glamour and the sheer creepiness of the star images under discussion in equal measure.