PUBLIC VS. PRIVAT ÎN MORTILE CELEBRITĂTILOR – CAZUL SERGIU NICOLAESCU
PUBLIC VS. PRIVAT in celebrities deaths - Sergiu Nicolaescu

Summary/Abstract: After living their lives in the public eye, do famous people regain their “privacy” after death or, on the contrary, could death mean their final transformation into a sort of public “commodity”? In order to get a better understanding of this public-private dichotomy (in relation to death), this paper will investigate the way the Romanian media covered the death of the famous movie director Sergiu Nicolaescu. To this end, I studied (using content analysis) over 80 articles, which were published in three Romanian newspapers („Libertatea”, „Jurnalul Naţional” and „Evenimentul Zilei”), between the 4th and the 11th of January 2013. The paper focuses on the role that the deceased’s family had in managing his posthumous “relationship” with the public. I will also argue that Nicolaescu’s widow came to represent a “scapegoat”. A widow dressed in an unlikely white, a public vocally questioning the way the Nicoleascu family had handled the director’s death, and a vivid debate over the rightness of cremation set the scene for one of the most intriguing news events of 2013 in Romania.

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