Star. Noun, masculine/feminine. A beneficiary of luck, talent and ego who is in the right part of the universe at the right time System. Noun, neuter. The illusion of method and order brought to the innately or incurably chaotic.

It is an old chestnut and an old canard. Perhaps it is a combination of both: duck with chestnut. Either way it deserves the film equivalent of a Michelin rosette, awarded for enduring inanity. It is the assertion that “the star system no longer exists”. I heard it the other day. I hear it, in one form or another, every year. What I love is the idea that stardom as a system ever existed.

I have spent most of my combative years as a critic fighting the idea that any certitude at all exists in the movie industry. This is its distinction, its glory, its romance. “Nobody knows anything,” screenwriter William Goldman said. It is why we love cinema and why we love stardom: that phenomenon we abuse by pretending it has a logic and structure when its real beauty is in its demonic elusiveness. Stardom is not about the finite. It is about the infinite.

Movie stardom was officially born in 1910. In that year Florence Lawrence - American cinema’s “first star” and until then known simply as “The Biograph Girl”, after her studio - had her rhyming name put up in lights. Previously, all screen performers had appeared anonymously. The man responsible for the revolution was Carl Laemmle, pioneer mogul and later founder of Universal Pictures. In 1910, after luring Lawrence from Biograph, he staged a fake car accident and her supposed death to conjure her real name into the newspapers. There was no looking back. Film celebrity, and the management of it, had arrived to stay.

With the centenary of movie stardom now a mere five years off, we will soon hear writers sharpening their pencils to compose the tributes, essays, dissertations, commemorative odes. So let’s be at the cutting edge and sharpen first. Let’s ask the most important duple question: what is stardom and has it ever boasted a system?

A notional system - a factitious one - existed for 40 years, from 1910 to 1950. Though the phrase “star system” has carried on as informal tender ever since, broadly defining the harnessing of star power for box-office ends, it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s that, to adapt the old Hollywood dictum, the lunatics left the asylum. That is, the major stars forsook the studio contract system. And it was precisely in 1950 that former contract star James Stewart declared his freedom by being the first actor to sign for percentage points in a movie (Winchester ‘73), empowering his profession for the future and engendering the age when Alec Guinness would clean up like Croesus on Star Wars.

When the stars left the studios, even the pretence of an ordered talent system, of teams of centrally governed screen glitterati who delivered star quality on cue, began to disintegrate.

We were back to chaos, assuming we had ever left it. The law of the jungle took over from the tablets of Tinseltown, brought down long before by the prophets from the hillside with the “Hollywood” sign. Stardom was a madness again. It obeyed no laws but lawlessness.

But had it ever? The three cornerstones of my own credo are this: 1. There is no such thing as a natural-born star (though nearly everyone would have you believe otherwise). 2. Stardom arrives by accident and departs as quickly. 3. We could all be stars if we found the star-quality key. This is proved, on the low-voltage level of reality drama, by TV’s Big Brother. Here the dorks and dead bulbs regularly prove more watchable than the folks with looks, intelligence and “personality”.

Because there are no rules or consistencies in the pathology of charisma, there is no system. The studio chiefs knew this in their hearts, but they dared not confess it. Even in the days when Garbo loved and emoted, in the high noon of Valentino or the sparkling midnight of MGM (the studio that boasted “more stars than there are in heaven”), there was never a foolproof method to the madness. There was a cosmos built on faith, hope and accident. Someone’s face, voice or mannerisms fluked into favour, for a while, with that fickle mass of people called “the public”.

A studio would structure this pandemonium to the extent it could. It knew that a film starring Cary Grant would make more money than one with Nick Nobody; that Ginger Rogers had star quality and Eleanor Powell (a better dancer) didn’t; that if you filled Gone with the Wind with familiar faces - Gable, Howard, de Havilland - you could take a chance on an unknown Limey called Vivien Leigh (pictured).

But this was a system like a gambler’s. If you kept doing the same thing at the card-table you had a chance of fooling fate, or lulling it into acquiescence. At the same time the studios lost heavily on stars who never blazed, despite endless work with the publicity bellows. (Think of John Gilbert, extinguished by the sound era; or Jennifer Jones, David O. Selznick’s earthbound angel; or Anna Sten, Sam Goldwyn’s “new Garbo”.) They knew that the wrong combination of stars could be as bad as none at all; that stars could burn out or, like Katharine Hepburn, they could fall into sudden, terrifying disfavour.

So could entire acting styles, ones that had seemed, a moment ago, inseparable from stardom. Half-way through the last century a new generation of unknowns, including James Dean and Marlon Brando, made the reigning poster pin-ups obsolete overnight. In came the mumblers and scratchers. Out went the stylists and extroverts. It was as if Planet Tinseltown had been invaded by another, alien race.

So let’s propose something instead of “system” to explain and encompass the workings of stardom. Let’s call it a self-perpetuating chaos: an organic cycle of burnout and renewal in which no one can safely predict who is next to go and who is next to arrive, but which has something - just something - to do with the demonic.

Nobody is born to stardom, though the myth is implicit in every rags-to-riches showbiz biopic from A Star Is Born to Inside Daisy Clover. You have it or you don’t (assert these films); as soon as the public sees you exposed to a spotlight you are made.

Yet some of our most popular actors toiled for years without pushing into stardom, or even looking as if they would. And they toiled right there in the public eye. For much of the 1960s no one thought Clint Eastwood a million-dollar movie baby, just eye-fodder for female viewers in a long-running cattle-herding teleseries called Rawhide. It was on television, too, that Michael Douglas sang for his supper year after year as the second-lead cop in The Streets of San Francisco. No one looked at him and thought, “There’s a star”.

Jack Nicholson’s record is even more impressive. He was a fully visible juvenile lead in movies for 11 years - albeit B-to-Z movies - before Easy Rider gave him fame and name. During that apprenticeship, in films such as The Cry Baby Killer or The Raven, he was as anodyne as a toothpaste ad, as gauche as a serial auditionee.

What did it for Nicholson, and for Eastwood and Douglas, is that they found their demons. They shucked the pinup ambitions; they looked into the dark side of themselves and found the light: Nicholson as a shyster lawyer with a pocket-picking grin, Eastwood as a laconic shooting machine with the fat stripped from his voice and dialogue, Douglas as a Wall Street shark whose pearly teeth and predatory voice suddenly evoked the evil magic of father Kirk.

An earlier example is an even better one. John Wayne had his first breakthrough leading role in 1930, in The Big Trail, a big western. But he made no impression at all. He spent nine subsequent years in the B-western wilderness, before John Ford cast him in Stagecoach and made him a legend. The demon that Wayne found was subtler than almost anyone’s: a kind of sandblown unreachability. Years of being an available actor with no one important availing themselves of him taught Wayne the magic of seeming unavailable. He now stood in deserts, eyes creased against wind and sand, looking like some ageless Ozymandias, proof against time, change, the caprices of destiny and demand.

Born to stardom? Birth is only half the process. The other half is to be reborn: at least if your infant years as a performer are ringing no one’s bell or cash register.

Conversely, and at times cataclysmically, there are stars who lose their demons. Ponder the spectacle of poor Burt Reynolds: for five years in a row (1978-82) America’s top male box-office draw, today rubbing two sticks together to try to make a spark. Not even the dry grass of audience memories recalling Deliverance, Hustle or City Heat can help produce a flame. Or consider the case of John Travolta who lost it, regained it (with Pulp Fiction) and is now experiencing a second star-death, having decided to commit career suicide with Battleship Earth.

For a star, as the heavens teach us, can also be a supernova, exploding into dust after its fieriest shining. Explanation? There is no ready one. The demon has gone. The demon came - or recame - and then it went.

As well as stardom by rebirth, there is stardom by replanting. The peerless example is Vivien Leigh. Never an idol or icon in her native Britain where the precocity of that voice - so Rada, so girls’ school - seemed to shrivel each role to which she lent a native accent (from Waterloo Bridge to her anglicised Anna Karenina), Leigh was twice metamorphosed by a southern American accent.

When she played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the Deep South cadences opened up her emotions as surely as her vowel sounds. The English rose became a wild American bramble. She produced blood-dark fruit from nowhere. She sank thorns into the drama of the movies and crawled all over them, to the astonishment of audiences who had either never heard of her (USA) or thought they had heard all she had to offer (UK). Each time Leigh returned to act in England in her English voice, her star demon vanished once more, in a puff of reverse sorcery.

Another example: would Arnold Schwarzenegger have been a star in his native Austria? Isn’t the exoticism of that clotted Styrian voice half his appeal? Staying in his native country he would have been no more than a bodybuilder with ideas above his station. In America he became a bizarre star with a boom-channel voice: a voice on which sailed vowels and consonants as peculiar, as outlandish, as an armada from Brobdingnag.

Take a last example. Jean Seberg was a colourless American ingenue who failed to fill the role of Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. Then she went to Paris. Enthralling film buffs with her Iowa-accented French in Godard’s Breathless, she became the muse to the French New Wave. A scandalous death - her barbiturate-filled body found in a car by Paris police after it had been decomposing for 10 days - was all Seberg needed for mythic status. A decade or two later her surname was in lights on theatre marquees. An entire musical had been written about her. All because she crossed a sea, cracked open an accent and presented a gamine look that proved sensational on the modern-day Champs Elysees when it had looked like nothing at all in the Hollywoodised France of Saint Joan. She had, in every sense, found her demons.

Now I must make a confession. At the risk of ridicule I must reveal my own demon. I was prompted to visit all these thoughts after a Damascene experience from the least likely, possibly most ludicrous, quarter. It was after seeing Hugh Laurie in House.

A confession is not an apology: I defend House as a font of philosophical insight. In my own house I am known as Hugh-Laurie-crazy. I cannot get over the wonder, the hilarity of it: that an actor hitherto known as an English buffoon, a gem in the crown of Blackadder and rival Britcoms, is now a hardboiled, grizzled TV star in an American dramatic supersoap. Put it another way: a successful character comedian in a little pond called the UK metamorphoses into a straight-acting leviathan in the big swamp of US television.

Never mind demonic. This change of character is Mephistophelian; we should almost say Faustian. (What bargains did Laurie strike with the dark powers?) It is as if P.G. Wodehouse had shown a late, sudden talent for writing noir thrillers, had hit the bookstands with The Maltese Cow-Creamer or Farewell, My Butler.

It is not a question of whether Laurie is good as the grouchy, ill-shaven medico. I think he is, but my household produces a split vote. I just feel the same way that Dr Johnson felt, before the age of political correctness, about women preachers. Like dogs walking on their hind legs, it is not a matter of whether they do it well; it is a wonder they can do it at all.

Maybe my feeling about Hugh Laurie is as actorist as Johnson’s was reprehensibly sexist. Actors can of course “act” - or so they will claim. It is only our obsession with typecasting them, a heritage of that non-existent star system (the concept of which even I probably subscribe to, unconsciously), that stops them acting. You cannot be a star in two different guises, we are taught. A true star blazes steadfastly, unchangingly, in one position only in the heavens.

But even this is disputable. Think of those rare stars who almost did seem born to stardom; who didn’t need rebirths or re-plantings, who just came on to a screen and took it over. We have mentioned some: Stewart, Grant, Valentino, Hepburn, Garbo. We are talking of the generation before the method realists and long before the shape-changers of today - the De Niros, Pacinos, Carreys - who delight in mixing stardom with character-acting, and who by doing so have truly taken the system out of star system, since if you don’t like the character they play, or think you won’t, you won’t pay to see the movie. And no system can be built on that. (Virtually no star in the modern age can be guaranteed to “open a movie”. Even Redford and Beatty have had straight-to-video flops. Even Tom Cruise cannot make Mr and Mrs Popcorn go to see Magnolia.)

Those earlier performers were stardom’s temple and template. They were the definition of what, back then, we thought stardom meant. The star, like its counterpart in our sky, blazed immovably while everything else revolved around it. Yet even with these Hollywood greats we keep finding the opposite. Like Galileo, only reversing his heresy, we can say of the sun, “Eppur si muove”. The star does move. It moves interestingly too: not in a random restlessness, but to the exact other pole of its solar system, pausing at no point between.

Take Cary Grant. He was the most dapper light comedian ever, yet he excelled at the opposite: sombre, menacing, potentially murderous in Hitchcock’s Suspicion and Notorious. James Stewart was the hick-voiced innocent in Mr Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story, yet he could be a murky battleground of phobias and neuroses in Vertigo (Hitchcock was the master at drawing out an actor’s demons). Katharine Hepburn was the definition of a free-spirited ingenue, full of joie de vivre and joie d’amour in The Philadelphia Story. Yet she played highly strung spinsters vibrant with repression in The African Queen and Summertime.

Age brings change? Yet years did not separate Grant’s dalliance with different roles, and Stewart carried on playing folksy parts while varying them with frazzled ones. It was these stars’ own version of “find the demon”. It didn’t raise them from anonymity as it raised Nicholson, Schwarzenegger or Seberg. But it helped sabotage the idea of stardom as something immutable, to whose celestial steadfastness we look with trust, faith and awe.

Stardom is not, and was not then, a system of anything. It is unstable, volatile, demonic. From a distance, perhaps, stardom has seemed a simple, changeless face issuing beams of radiance to goggling earthlings. But if we look closer at our own sun - for a paradigm - we see what it actually is: a nuclear reactor engaged in converting elements in a non-stop fissile apocalypse.

I like Hugh Laurie as Dr Greg House - to go back to a couch-potato critic’s catalysing moment - because he and his antic casting make anything seem possible: anything except that stardom, on whatever size of screen, will ever sit still and allow us to think it is or has a “system”.

Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic.