I have been pondering what it is that constitutes a 'celebrity' lately, and while I haven't exactly answered the question myself, it did get me to thinking about the extent to which someone is internationally famous. During my lunch hour I sketched the following Venn diagram about celebrities in the U.K., U.S., and Australia (I couldn't figure out how to handle Canadians just yet) based on their professions. Notice that I left off celebrities from the arts, politics, and news of the weird for now (
click here for a bigger image).
According to my diagram, there are relatively few athletes who become international celebrities, whereas musicians and movie stars are likely to have a bigger world impact. I also couldn't think of any instances where someone is a celebrity in Australia and the U.S., but not one in the U.K., whereas there are many uniquely popular in the U.K. and Australia. But what do you think?
6 comments:
Great idea and most accurate - but I think there are lots more Aussie atheletes who are known in the UK (because of "the Cricket").
Where do the celebutantes fit in? I suppose that eventually they become TB stars or movie stars. My only beef with your diagram is that the musicians category should overlap with both TV and movie stars (e.g. Jessica Simpson, Ice-T, Queen Latifah, Madonna, etc.).
I've noticed that there are a heck of a lot of Australians and Brits in the U.S. media machine than I ever knew...e.g. the star of House is English and there's an Australian in every home improvement show I've ever seen.
Um, don't like Ruseel Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett et al qualify as celebrities who are famous in both Australia, the US and UK?
What about the Thunder from Down Under?
I think anonymous missed the point. :)
But yeah, interesting diagram. I would just put those Aussie movie and music stars a little further into the tri-nation celebrity space since it seems that they're always more famous overseas, or they get famous overseas first before coming back to Oz.
I haven't tried it, but I think I wouldn't be able to list more than 10 Aussie movie stars, and maybe 15-20 Aussie musical acts, which would fit into the tri-nation space, so that's why I made that overlap area relatively small. Audra, it's nice of you to think of me as the "Thunder Down Under," but I'm not really a celebrity...yet.
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