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This article offers the first detailed scholarly account of the role of the continuity supervisor, also known as script supervisor, in film production. After examining in more general terms its attendant duties and responsibilities, the typical career trajectories of a number of ‘continuity girls’ working in British cinema and the deeply gendered nature of this section of film production labour, the article goes on to examine continuity supervision in more depth through looking at two specific case studies: two continuity supervisors who worked on several productions directed by David Lean, Maggie Unsworth and Barbara Cole. The work of Unsworth and Cole provides a starting point for reconsidering the significance of the hitherto critically marginalised ‘continuity girl’, and the article concludes with suggestions for further study in this area

This chapter provides an introductory overview to the book’s focus on female British stars, explains the parameters of the study and its principle methods, and provides some broader historical contextualisation of ideas of stardom in British cinema culture from the silent period to the present day.

Film stars are often seen as a predominantly Hollywood creation but this book explores how British cinema developed its own culture of stardom, and how its female stars have been prized by audiences worldwide. Female Stars of British Cinema uses case studies of seven female stars whose careers span the 1940s to the present day – Jean Kent, Diana Dors, Rita Tushingham, Glenda Jackson, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Lloyd, and Judi Dench – to explore how British star femininities have developed over time, and how the image of the British female star has responded to broader social and cultural changes. These ‘women in question’ offer a way into the complexities of British cinema’s culture of stardom which has sometimes espoused glamour and sometimes rejected it, and is entangled with issues of regional, national and ethnic identity, as well as class, sexuality and age. Exploring and investigating the variety of British star femininities over the last seventy-five years, this book also interrogates the omissions and absences from that same cinematic firmament.

Drawing on new and established approaches to film costume, this article examines the creative work of the costume designer, contextualizing it as a gendered profession. It takes the career of the British film costume designer Julie Harris as its illustrative case study, tracing her working practice and sense of creative agency through interviews and press coverage as well as the BFI's extensive collection of her annotated costume sketches. Special emphasis is placed on Harris's negotiation of changing modes of postwar British film production, and her management of the professional tensions between costuming in the service of narrative or costuming as spectacle—in Stella Bruzzi's words, the dilemma of whether to look at or through the clothes on-screen. It culminates in a detailed analysis of Harris's Oscar-winning costume work for Darling (1965) and her ambivalence toward the youth-oriented off-the-rack fashions of the 1960s. In conclusion, it emphasizes the significance and complexity of the costume designer's creative labor, and the need for that work to be granted greater visibility.