Celebrities Then And Now

Cultures and regions with a significant population may have their own independent celebrity systems, with distinct hierarchies of popular film, television and sports stars. For example, the Canadian province of Quebec, which is French-speaking, has its own system of French-speaking television, movie and music celebrities. A person who garners a degree of fame in one culture may be considered less famous or obscure in another. Some nationwide celebrities might command some attention outside their own nation; for example, the singer Lara Fabian is widely known in the French-speaking world, but only had a couple of Billboard hits in the U.S., whereas the francophone Canadian singer Celine Dion is well known in both the French-speaking world and in the U.S.
Regions within a country, or cultural communities (linguistic, ethnic, religious) can also have their own celebrity systems, especially in linguistically or culturally distinct regions such as Quebec or Wales. Regional radio personalities, newscasters, politicians or community leaders may be local or regional celebrities.
A local celebrity is a person well known in one locality but are little known elsewhere. A person might have celebrity status within a particular culture (such as Jesus) or might be unique to a particular diaspora.
English-speaking media commentators and journalists will sometimes refer to celebrities as belonging to the A-List or state that a certain actor belongs to the B-List, the latter being a disparaging context. These informal rankings indicate a placing within a hierarchy. However, due to differing levels of celebrity in different regions, it is difficult to place people within one bracket. A Brazilian actor might be a B-list action film actor in the US, but an A-list star in Portugal. An objective method of placing celebrities from any country into categories from A-List to H-List based on their number of Google hits has been proposed, but this method only works for people with distinctive names, e.g., Jason Mewes, not Kevin Smith.