A true Hollywood star

Slimmed down and drop-dead glamorous, Sharon Stone has been behaving exactly as a real film star should during the Cannes Film Festival this week. Not for her the throwaway shrug of cargo pants and sweatshirt. She leaves that sort of dressing down to Gwyneth, Kate and the rest. For Stone, it's nothing less than full-on star quality, something that Hollywood has been missing for far too long.

"Ready when you are, Mr DeMille," is not the defining quote of 20th century film just because it shows who was really the film-making boss. Its true importance lies in the way it defined not only the star system, but also the all-powerful studio regime, which made the stars in the first place. Actually, they didn't just make them, they remade them - into goddesses. Names were changed, new styles and colour for hair were ruthlessly imposed, and faces recreated not just by make-up, but some of the earliest known experiments in cosmetic surgery. Rumour has always insisted that the first step to transforming Marlene Dietrich from Fräulein to femme fatale was to remove her back teeth so that her cheeks would sink, making her unlike any other woman on or off the screen. Until the inevitable imitations came along. That was how the studio system made film stars into the cultural icons of their times.

They never imitated; they always initiated, confident that the power of the silver screen - and it did have huge power over everyday life in the days of black and white movies - would create a fashion that all women would long to follow, even if their finances and figures weren't up to the standards set by the film goddesses. These standards were as important off as on the screen. Gloria Swanson was provided with a private train by Paramount for her promotional tours, not because she needed one, but because the studio knew that that was what her public expected of a top international star.

This all changed with the collapse of the studio system in the Fifties in the face of escalating costs and the threat of television. As we all know, there's nothing epic about TV. It is cosy, unmemorable and lacking in glamour. To keep in tune with it, film stars stopped being goddesses and became girls-next-door. Doris Day, Mitzi Gaynor and Debbie Reynolds were as simple as children in their appeal, compared to the complex erotic messages conveyed by such earlier greats as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Dietrich.

The mystique and the magic were kept alive for a little longer by the likes of Ava Gardner, but what at first seemed wild and exciting in her private life - toreadors, troubadours and the occasional sheik notwithstanding - soon degenerated into tacky ordinariness. Like Rita Hayworth, one of the last Hollywood glamour stars, Gardner fell from grace, leaving only Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly to hold high the flag of Hollywood style.

Since then, it's been downhill all the way as stars have dressed down, afraid that recreating a glamorous mystique might destroy their mass appeal. That's why Sharon Stone stands out like a beacon.

Turning her back on the latest trendy look (hell, we've got J-Lo and Mary J Blige for that sort of thing), she has done this week in Cannes what a true Hollywood star should do. She's pulled out all the stops to look every inch the screen goddess - and she's done so magnificently. Stone clearly knows that unapologetic, full-on glamour is making a comeback. We want our stars to look fabulously larger than life, not to appear for photo calls as if they've just got out of bed and have simply thrown on the first thing they can find.

Even more, we've moved on from tacky tricks to catch the cameras - the sort of skimpy, cheap outfits our soap stars are still parading around in at awards ceremonies.

That's why Sharon Stone has been such a powerful visual triumph this week. She represents a return to an approach to being a star that would be perfectly understood by Crawford, Garbo and all the great Hollywood names of the past.