White Dwarf Starlet / Film

• After the Fox, another Peter Sellers film, has former "international handsome star" Tony Powell. He's artificially tanned and white-toothed (which he shows off as a Perpetual Smiler), uses shoe polish to cover his graying hair and is convinced that he's perfect to make a comeback as the hero of the old noir films he used to star in while his agent tries to bring him to reality. Sellers' character is easily able to manipulate him. Powell was played by a self-parodying Victor Mature.
• Jimmy from The Air Up There is a former college basketball star until he blew his knee. To be accepted into the Winabi tribe, he had to throw away his championship ring.
• Alegría has a touching variant in the Cafe Opera, a watering hole that specifically caters to old, forgotten performers, providing them comfort and support from their peers in their twilight years (some even engage in romances with each other). The owner himself is a dancer and now alcoholic known as Old Taps. (Ironically, his actor, Brian Dewhurst, is a circus performer who had already worked with Cirque on and offstage. A year or two after the film was shot, he joined Cirque's Mystere as a clown, and is still with the show today...)
• Truth in Television for Anvil as portrayed in Anvil! The Story of Anvil. The band was huge in the '80s, sharing the stage with Bon Jovi and Whitesnake but ended up completely forgotten by history. Their documentary ends with a concert in Japan, where thousands of fans turn up despite a bad spot on the schedule.
• The premise of The Artist, where male superstar actor George Valentin is slowly fading into one as talking movies become the new craze. However, he somewhat manages to avoid this fate by becoming a dancing performer.
• In Bill & Ted Face the Music, the titular duo are revealed to be this. Having once been epic rockers playing to huge crowds, they now play to much-smaller audiences who aren't necessarily there to see them.
  The Great Leader: 25 years ago, you played a concert in front of the entire world. One month ago, you played in Barstow, California, for 40 people, most of whom were there for "Two-Dollar Taco Night!"
• Helen Sinclair in Bullets over Broadway. "Don't speak!"
• Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. A bit out of the ordinary: Now she's running on the fumes of her former notoriety, but initially she was pushed into the limelight somewhat against her will and found stardom humiliating.
• Clouds of Sils Maria involves an actress who was an ingenue many years earlier who's now wrestling with the prospect of doing a remake of her most famous performance... except that a younger actress now has the role she previously played.
• The short film Conventional stars Karen Gillan (who also wrote and directed it) as a former scream queen whose career burned out once she was seen as too old by casting directors, and laments how her Typecasting as "the hot chick who dies in horror movies" essentially made it impossible to get any different roles. Now, she's had extensive (and obvious) plastic surgery to hide her age, and she works the convention circuit where the only people who still care about her are the most deranged fans of her older films. When one of them kills her during a photo session, her last words are "thank you", partly because it will finally put her name back in the spotlight, and partly because she hated how pathetic her life had become.
• Crooked House: Magda claims that she and Philip were once the most glamorous couple in London. If this is true, then current position definitely makes her one: doing provincial repertory and clinging desperately to the hope that Philip's screenplay is going to make her a star again.
• Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her is one, with the added twist that even in her prime, she actually kinda sucked at performing (she's introduced while starring in a horrendous musical version of Sweet Bird Of Youth that has the audience walk out on it), with her only real appeal being her beauty. Happily, Streep has averted this trope in real life, being one of the longest-lasting starlets in Hollywood history.
• Dinner at Eight provides a very sad example in Larry Renault, who was a big star in the silent movie days but who now is a washed-up alcoholic who can't even get jobs in vaudeville. After his disgusted manager gives Larry an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech, Larry is Driven to Suicide.
• Dame Evey from Driving Lessons: an alcoholic, classically trained actress; reduced to a role on a daytime soap opera when her career began to fade, she has not worked since.
• Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, which makes him perfect for a starring role in one of the worst movies ever. Sadly Truth in Television; by that point in Lugosi's life, Ed Wood was all but the only director in Hollywood willing to work with him.
• Faded rock star Rex Manning in Empire Records. This is lampshaded by a teenage boy who gets an autograph from Manning because "my mom has all your albums" despite never personally having heard a single one of Manning's songs. Subverted in the Director's Cut version of the film. In an alternate take of the "You're just a has-been" scene, he trades his cocky attitude and quote from The Who's "My Generation", for a heartfelt and bitter "you might be right" acknowledgment.
• Elise Elliot is on her way to becoming this in The First Wives Club. She is still recognised by her fans, but her career is fading. She is struggling to get a role and when she finally thinks she will be cast as the star of a new film it turns out the young and hip regisseur wants her as the ugly and grotesque Mother. She has undergone major plastic surgery and is an alcoholic. She drunkenly complains about how Sean Connery is 400 years old and still a star, but women are cast as the mother when they are older than 20. In her apartment, she has an entire room filled with her memorabilia, including prizes she won, gifts, etc. Fortunately, at the end of the film, she gets better.
• Peter Vincent in Fright Night (1985), a former B-movie actor once famous for playing a vampire hunter in a series of Hammer-esque films who now hosts a late-night horror program that's just been canceled. He gets called out of retirement to reprise his role for real.
• The former Galaxy Quest cast, most of whom are only getting paid from publicity appearances these days.
• Goliath Awaits: Ronald Bentley (who was a matinee idol in his prime during the sinking) has insecurities about being one if he's rescued after so many decades and placed in a world which wouldn't have any place for him to resume acting.
• Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray (1988), and especially in the later version. Her song "The Legend of Miss Baltimore Crabs" details her beauty queen past.
• How to Lose Friends & Alienate People has a very sympathetic example as a minor character. Sidney notices that she's alone and downcast at a huge celebrity hobnob, ignored by everyone else in attendance, despite her long and respectable career in Hollywood. The older actress is genuinely touched when he introduces himself as a huge fan.
• Roy Munson from Kingpin is a former bowling star who lost his hand.
• An infamous example: Joan Crawford (played by Faye Dunaway) in Mommie Dearest. As Crawford got older (both in the film and in real life), she parlayed her talents into increasingly ridiculous guest appearances and starring roles in an attempt to regain her stardom. Most infamously, Crawford took over a role intended for her daughter (who was a good thirty years younger than her) in a bid to get her name back in the spotlight.
• Another male example: Buddy Young Jr. in Mr. Saturday Night.
• Downplayed male example: Alex Fletcher in Music and Lyrics certainly fits the 'forgotten has-been' aspect of the trope, but doesn't display much serious desire to get back to the way things were; his main motivation is not to get back onto the top but to keep his profile up high enough so that he can keep doing the low-rent theme park gigs that sustain him (and possibly even land a lucrative contract at Disney Land).
• Nope has Ricky "Jupe" Park, a former child actor whose career was cut short after his second project, a sitcom starring a chimpanzee named Gordy, was cancelled after a violent incident on set where Gordy beat two of Ricky's costars to death and maimed a third after being frightened by a popping balloon. Now a middle-aged owner of a two-bit carnival in the middle of the desert, Ricky is desperately clinging to relevance, including having a small private museum dedicated to the bloody Gordy incident to rake in some extra cash despite the trauma it brings him. After he encounters a predatory beast from space that resembles a UFO, Ricky manages to delude himself into thinking he's tamed it by feeding it horses, before attempting to monetize the thing by creating a new attraction around it, the Star Lasso Experience. This leads to Ricky, his family, and 40 people in the audience being eaten alive by the UFO during the inaugural performance.
• In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Rick Dalton was the lead character of a very successful Western TV show in the 50's until he quit to pursue a film career. He failed to really break out as a star and since returning to television has been increasingly cast as The Heavy to boost the careers of newer, younger stars. Rick is painfully aware that his credibility as a leading man is fading and fears become a has-been.
• Sam (Peter Sellers) in The Optimists 1973 is a variant. He apparently was almost famous in English vaudeville at one point and certainly has the ramshackle house, old costumes and clippings, and drinking problem. But in his old age, he still performs as a busker (street performer) and seems content to get by that way, with no delusions of grandeur.
• Bertha in Poor Pretty Eddie was a successful and glamorous showgirl, but is now an overweight, middle-aged alcoholic who surrounds herself with old photos of herself and practically defines herself by her abusive relationship with a much younger Eddie. When Liz, a famous jazz singer, ends up at Bertha's motel, Bertha immediately becomes jealous of her and constantly antagonizes her, most notably by refusing to help Liz after she's raped by Eddie. In her mind, she believes that keeping Liz as Eddie's captive at the motel will teach her a lesson about how one day, Liz's fame will dry up just like hers did.
• Deconstructed in Postcards from the Edge with Doris, and lampshaded with her performance of "I'm Still Here".
• Max Bialystock in The Producers was once a successful Broadway Producer (at least in his own mind), but is washed-up and forced to sponge off of little old ladies when the show starts. This is especially true in the musical version, where he opens the show singing, "I used to be the King, the King of Old Broadway."
• The Trope Codifier would probably be Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, a silent film star who never made the transition into talking pictures. Despite her advancing age and secluded existence, she still believes she's big enough to star in one more picture, with Cecil B. DeMille to direct her. Includes a double helping of Reality Subtext, as Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, who had been one of silent film's biggest stars but who never made the transition to "talkies". In a Genius Bonus, Desmond watches one of her old films— actually the Gloria Swanson movie Queen Kelly, directed by Erich Von Stroheim, a once-prominent director whose career behind the camera ended with the silent film era (though he maintained an acting career), who plays Desmond's butler (who, it turns out, was also her first director... and her first husband). (Because Queen Kelly went grossly over budget, and was never completed, it effectively ended both Gloria Swanson's and Erich von Stroheim's careers in the silent movie business.) Interestingly, Swanson had to be made up as older than she looked to play a character who was younger than she was!
• The entire band in This is Spın̈al Tap. Not that they aren't popular anymore, not by any means, it's just that "their appeal has grown more selective." A truly sad moment in this uproarious comedy is when the band hears an oldies station playing one of their hits as "The Thamesmen"... followed by the DJ consigning them to the "Where Are They Now?" file, when where they are is playing a concert in that very city. Ultimately subverted: it turns out they're big in Japan.
• Vitriolic producer Les Grossman uses these exact words to describe Tugg Speedman if Tropic Thunder (the movie-within-the-movie) fails.
  "Speedman is a dying star. A white dwarf...heading for a black hole. That's physics."
• Walk Hard: Dewey Cox is a rock and roll superstar in the 1950s. While he's able to maintain some relevancy in the sixties by changing up his sound, by the seventies his popularity has collapsed and he's reduced to hosting a variety show in an attempt to hold on to his fame. After killing his father in a machete duel and reuniting with his multiple illegitimate children, he retires from the spotlight to focus on his family. He eventually becomes popular again in the 2000s when a rapper samples one of his songs and sparks new interest in his music, and he comes out of retirement for one last show before dying of a heart attack.
• This is the entire premise of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?. Jane Hudson is a Former Child Star in vaudeville theater, and her sister Blanche was a successful film actress as a young adult. Now Blanche is crippled from Jane accidentally hitting her with a car, and Jane is a disturbed alcoholic who can't accept that her career dried up when she aged and couldn't make the transition to movies. She still dresses like she does when she was 'Baby Jane', and resents and torments Blanche. Actually, Blanche was the one driving the car, attempting to hit Jane. Blanche had resented that she was tied to her scandal-ridden, talentless sister, and tried to kill her. The book even states that she prevented Jane from seeking psychiatric help in order to better manipulate her. The film ends with Blanche presumably dead and Jane having snapped completely, believing that the police and crowds are there to see her comeback.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit finds Betty Boop working as a nightclub cigarette girl, having been put out of business by cartoons going to color.^note There actually is one color Betty cartoon, Poor Cinderella (1934). And Betty's a Significant Greeneyed Redhead in it! She's fairly philosophical about it, though. Counts for a bit of a Tear Jerker, especially Eddie's sad reaction after she assures him she's Still Got It.^note Eddie: "Yeah, you still got it." You can thank this movie for helping to revive Betty Boop's career, if not as an animated film star then as a merchandising icon.^note It should be noted, however, that she technically never "lost" it in the first place, making it a subversion out of universe.

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