roomforthetuna posted:

Similarly, in the early days of cinema the actors names were obliged to be censored in the end credits as part of the actor anonymity contract, and the characters of their names were replaced with stars, eg. Charlie Chaplin would be credited as ******* *******.

One studio worked around this by announcing at the beginning of the movie whose names were going to be "starred", hence the phrase "starring Charlie Chaplin". It turned out that having their names known was to the actors' benefit, so the anonymity clause has been removed from the standard acting contract, but the term "starring" lived on.