Celebrity studies is now a burgeoning subfield within film and media studies, with its own journal (Celebrity Studies [founded in 2010]), international conferences, and a raft of publications that have defined its parameters, notably work by Graeme Turner (2014), Chris Rojek (2001 , 2012 ), P. David Marshall (2014), Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (2006), Su Holmes and Diane Negra (2011). In its basic premise that celebrity, far from being a trivial adjunct to the serious business of film theory,

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... tory, philosophy or aesthetics, is central to understanding how contemporary society functions, the field is indebted to the flagship work of Richard Dyer in Stars (1979) and Heavenly Bodies (1986), where he argued that 'being interested in stars is being interested in how we are human now'. [1] Where these two books nuance and extend the study of celebrity culture is the attention both bring to bear on how celebrity may well be instructive in thinking not just about how we are human, but how we as humans understand and relate to each other within our contemporary social formation. This is a significant shift, as star studies have always understood the function of the star, and by extension the celebrity, to be that of shoring up the notion of the individual. From the development of character within narrative, to the interest in the 'picture personality', to contemporary accounts of how celebrity relates to 'the growth of individualism [and]...the rise of democracy',[2] film and celebrity culture have given us reams of information about certain individuals, whether fictional or real, and in doing so made us believe in the very concept and tangibility of individual life. Yet, these books imply, we do not live our lives as cloistered individuals, but within various groupings, and surely celebrity culture, if such an important aspect of social life, must also speak to us about how we understand family, friends, children, lovers, partners, or even what Chris Rojek in Presumed Intimacy: Para-Social Relationships in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2015) names as the 'shadow life'