Location: BSECS 2017, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

This paper considers the relationship between celebrity and mortality. Since the publication of Joseph Roach’s work on public intimacy and the ‘it-effect’ of ‘abnormally interesting people’, critics such as Felicity Nussbaum, Helen Brooks, Heather McPherson and others have explored how ‘It’ has ‘to do with sex’, particularly for actresses. But few have followed Roach’s hints at the fact that ‘It’, like the Freudian id, also has something to do with death. Using a variety of examples from the life of David Garrick, I argue here that, through the performance of death on-stage and off, in his own scenes and in those made by others, this actor used intimations of his own mortality to establish a powerful social status, a peculiar kind of public intimacy which both guaranteed his living celebrity and helped established posthumous glory.