White Dwarf Starlet / Anime & Manga

• It's All There in the Manual. Ever wonder why B.T., the manipulative Distaff Counterpart to Bear behaves so peevishly in .hack//SIGN? According to a hidden message in the OVAs, she's actually a model who was recently told she's too old to keep in the business. Undoubtedly, The Game Within The Show, The World, is a vent for her.
• Akira Kogami from the anime adaptation of Lucky Star qualifies for this at age 14, having worked as an Idol Singer since she was 3 years old and is now relegated to a three-minute Greek Chorus show at the end of each episode. And boy, is she bitter about it. However, in the original manga she's still at the peak of her career.
• Averted in Glass Mask, where top actress Chigusa Tsukikage was horribly disfigured in a stage accident but she remains extremely popular and famous, and she hasn't even lost her acting skills. Now she's more into teaching and finding an "heiress", and the biggest candidates are Ayumi and Maya.
• In the anime anthology Memories, the first short, Magnetic Rose (also directed by Satoshi Kon,) has key to its story a once-great opera singer [Eva] who isolated herself in a satellite in the wake of a scandal. It is filled with reminders of her success and uses holograms to simulate a lavish mansion. Her consciousness still haunts the decaying satellite long after her death.
• Subverted in another Satoshi Kon film, Millennium Actress. The titular actress has faded from the limelight and lives a reclusive life surrounded by memorabilia of her past fame, but her departure from the spotlight was intentional — resulting from a broken heart — and she has no interest in a comeback. She lives in the past because she's not interested in the present.
• In a major twist, the true villain in Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue turns out to be Mima's overweight, middle-aged female manager Rumi, who was a former pop idol who didn't last and now thinks she's the real Mima. The climax of the film where Rumi chases Mima in the illusory form of Mima's giggling, pop-idol alter-ego while trying to kill her is genuinely disturbing.
• Private Actress is a manga about the acting industry in the Japan of The '90s, so there are some of these:
  • Shiho's mother Sayuri Nagasawa almost became this in While she IS both beautiful and a very talented actress, getting a huge scar on her face almost ruined her career. Ultimately, she's hinted to have averted the trope by returning to stage acting.
  • Sayuri's old rival Ruriko Daichi deeply fears to become this, and Shiho spends some time posing as her assistant and helping her to deal with the prospect and her own inner demons. Shiho even gets to beautifully lampshade the trope:
    Shiho: All actresses have their era to shine. Afterwards, they fade away. Like Greta Garbo, retiring in a beautiful house. Or in the case of Marilyn Monroe, death. But some actresses are still around! Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn... they're all old. They follow the change of seasons, spring being followed by autumn...
• In one of the Sakura Wars OAVs, a particular movie studio was supposedly haunted by the ghost of such a lady; a silent film star whose roles dried up with the introduction of Talkies. Supposedly this was because while she was beautiful, she had a bad speaking voice but the truth is that her diva attitude alienated everyone in the industry. Since this is Sakura Wars, the rumors are true and her horrific spectre really is hanging around and deadly jealous of the Hanagumi members filming in the studio. The OAV ends with an Aesop of respecting both the cast and crew of a production and the ghost fades away as she returns to the state she was in during her glory days.

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