KEARLEY, Victoria

Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith: From Latin Lover and Hollywood Bad Girl to Loyal Husband and Aging Female Star

 

Through an analysis of English language print media sources, this paper will examine the way in which the press’ response to the relationship of Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith has evolved since they became a celebrity couple in 1995. I will argue that, though their relationship has been portrayed in an increasingly positive light in the seventeen years since they first became a couple, the media representation of it continues to be heavily dependent on anglicised white and patriarchal discourses of gender and ethnicity.

I will first explore how the media portrayal of Banderas’ and Griffith’s relationship in the 1990s served to cast Banderas’ burgeoning Hollywood star persona in the long-standing tradition of the ‘Latin Lover’ archetype. While Griffith, then a major Hollywood star with a ‘Bad Girl’ reputation, received great publicity and heavily gendered criticism for her affair with the then married Spanish star.

I will then compare the media representation of this early period of their relationship with that within the last decade, considering how it demonstrates a shift in the balance of power within the public image of this celebrity couple, Banderas now maintaining a higher screen profile than his wife. I will argue that although the media portrayal of their relationship continues to cast Banderas as a romantic Latin Lover, he and Griffith’s relationship is no longer portrayed as scandalous. Instead the same ethnic and gendered discourses surrounding the stars, now both in their 50s, manifest themselves differently with attention focused on Banderas’ loyalty and passionate devotion to Griffith as an aging female star.

  

Victoria Kearley has been studying for a PhD in Film, part-time at the University of Southampton since October 2008. The representation of Hispanic masculinity in contemporary Hollywood cinema is the subject of her doctoral thesis, which considers how popular genre conventions can reconfigure traditional conceptions of race, gender and sexuality within mainstream cinema. She has worked as a part-time lecturer at the University of Portsmouth and the University of Southampton and currently serves as postgraduate representative for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Latino/a Caucus.