From Youth Icon to Scarlet Diva: Asia Argento as an Italian Difficult Woman

In this article, we will try to reconstruct the origins and the developments of Asia Argento’s star image, from her professional debut at the end of the 1980s, to the moment in which such image became stable at around mid-2000s – remaining then pretty much intact to this day. In order to do so, we will adopt a theoretical approach closely related to that developed by Richard Dyer in his now classic study on film stardom. More precisely, we will focus on two distinct (though complementary) analytic perspectives. On the one hand, through the historical sources at our disposal, we will try to trace the main stages of her career, with specific attention to its moments of transition and to the changes in her public image; on the other, we will try to identify the main semantic cores that subtend and inform her star persona.