Actor

• 1. Introduction

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  Acting is among the oldest professions with a traceable name: the Greek performer Thespis stepped onto the stage at the Theatre Dionysus in 534 BC and became the first known person to speak words as a character in a play. Before that moment, Grecian stories existed only as song, dance, and third-person narration. One person stepping forward and saying "I am someone else" changed the relationship between storyteller and audience forever. The word Thespian, still used for actors today, carries that origin. But for most of the centuries that followed, who could stand on a stage, and in whose voice a story could be told, was never a simple question. The answers varied by empire, by century, by religion, by city, and sometimes by decree of a king. This is the story of the actor: what the craft demands, who has been permitted to practice it, and how radically unequal its rewards remain.

• 2. The Word and Its Baggage

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  The word "actor" existed in English for much of the language's history simply to mean "one who does something," and was not applied to stage performers until the 16th century. The term "actress" entered the record even later: the Oxford English Dictionary traces its earliest use in reference to stage performance to 1608, in an anonymous play called Famelie of Love. Seventeenth-century writers sometimes spelled it "actoress" or "actoresse." By the 19th century the word had acquired a stigma, as actresses were frequently associated with courtesans and promiscuity. That same century also produced the first female stage stars, most notably Sarah Bernhardt, whose fame complicated the prejudice. The drift back toward "actor" as a gender-neutral term gathered pace in the 1950s and 1960s, as the contributions of women to cultural life came under broader scrutiny. When The Observer and The Guardian published a joint style guide in 2010, it advised using "actor" for both sexes and classified "actress" alongside "authoress, comedienne, manageress, 'lady doctor', 'male nurse'" as terms that "date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex." Whoopi Goldberg put it plainly: "An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor. I can play anything." The UK performers' trade union Equity has taken no official position, saying the subject "divides the profession." The Academy Award for Best Actress, meanwhile, still carries that word in its title.

• 3. Who Was Allowed Onstage

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  Women were barred entirely from performing in ancient Greek theatre; male actors played female parts, and there is even historical debate over whether women were permitted in the audience. Ancient Rome was more permissive in practice: female performers existed, some achieved wealth and recognition, and they organized their own guild, the Sociae Mimae. Named performers from Rome include Eucharis, Dionysia, Galeria Copiola, and Fabia Arete. But the profession apparently died out in late antiquity. In the Middle Ages, Western Europe fell into disorder. Travelling troupes of actors were viewed with suspicion, denounced by the Church as immoral and pagan, and in many parts of Europe were denied a Christian burial. At the same time, churches themselves began staging dramatized biblical scenes; by the middle of the 11th century, liturgical drama had spread from Russia to Scandinavia to Italy. Amateur male performers dominated those religious plays, though the ban on women was never absolute: in 1514, women were engaged to perform all the female roles in the Bozen Passion Play in the city of Bolzano. The earliest surviving secular play from the Middle Ages is The Play of the Greenwood by Adam de la Halle, staged in 1276, which included satirical scenes and folk material involving faeries. Professional actors of any kind only began to appear in England and Europe toward the end of the Late Middle Ages, and both Richard III and Henry VII maintained small companies of them.

• 4. Italy Breaks the Pattern

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  Lucrezia Di Siena, whose name appears on an acting contract dated the 10th of October 1564, is recognized as the first Italian actress known by name. Vincenza Armani and Barbara Flaminia followed as the first documented primadonnas and the first well-documented actresses in both Italy and Europe. From the 1560s onward, actresses became the norm in Italian theaters, and when Italian companies toured abroad, they introduced female performers to audiences across the continent. The tradition that made this possible was the Commedia dell'arte, an actor-centered form that required little scenery and few props, built around stock characters and loose improvised frameworks. A typical troupe consisted of 13 to 14 members, and most actors were paid a share of the profits roughly proportional to the size of their role. In 1548, both male and female Italian actors performed the tragicomedy La Calandria by Bernardo Dovizi during the entry of King Henri II and Catherine de Medici into Lyon. A witness named Brantome recorded that the performance was "very well performed by the actors and actresses, who were very beautiful, spoke very well, and were extremely graceful." During the Spanish Golden Age theatre, which ran from 1590 to 1641, women performed from the outset. Ana Munoz took over her husband's theater company after his death; Micaela de Lujan, who lived from around 1570 to 1614, became the model for the character Carmila Lucinda by the playwright Lope de Vega.

• 5. England's Late Arrival

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  England was the outlier in Western Europe. As late as the first half of the 17th century, English women were still barred from the stage. The Italian actress Angelica Martinelli, a member of a visiting Commedia dell'arte company, had performed in England as early as 1578, making her possibly the first actress to do so on English soil. When a French theatre company was permitted a guest appearance at the Blackfriars Theatre in London in November 1629, the actresses were, as recorded at the time, "hissed, booed and pippin-pelted from the stage." An eighteen-year Puritan prohibition on drama then closed the theatres entirely, a result of Puritans viewing the stage as immoral. When Charles II restored the monarchy and reopened the theatres in 1660, the situation changed by royal preference: Charles enjoyed watching actresses perform. He issued letters patent to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, granting them a monopoly over two London theatre companies, and those patents were reissued in 1662 with language explicitly allowing women to perform. Margaret Hughes is often credited as the first professional actress on the English stage under this new order. The period from 1660 to 1710, known as the Restoration, produced comedies notorious for their sexual explicitness, and introduced both the first professional actresses and the first celebrity actors to England. Henry Irving, born in 1838 and died in 1905, became the most celebrated of the British actor-managers who followed, and his knighthood in 1895 marked the profession's full acceptance into the upper circles of British society.

• 6. The Craft Itself

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  Konstantin Stanislavski's system asks actors to draw on their own feelings and experiences to reach the emotional truth of a character, placing themselves inside the character's mindset to find genuine common ground. Lee Strasberg built on that foundation with what became known as method acting, formalizing the idea that actors must develop both an emotional and a cognitive understanding of their roles by drawing from their own lives. Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner also drew from Stanislavski but developed distinct approaches that are not classified as method acting. The Meisner technique requires the actor to focus entirely on the other actor in the scene, treating them as if they are real and the only thing that exists in that moment; the technique holds that acting finds its expression in human responses to other people and circumstances. Theatre actors must also master practical mechanics: stage directions such as "upstage" and "downstage," the physical blocking of where and how to move, and for some productions, stage combat choreographed by fight directors. Silent film demanded a different discipline entirely: from 1894 through the late 1920s, actors emphasized body language and facial expression to carry narrative without dialogue. Lillian Gish has been called film's "first true actress" for pioneering techniques specific to the camera. Director D.W. Griffith required his performers to undergo weeks of film-specific training after recognizing that theatrical acting did not read well on screen. When sound arrived, new demands emerged: finding a marked position on the floor where lights and camera focus align, preparing characters in full before shooting scenes that may be filmed out of narrative order, and conveying emotion through what one account described as "subtle facial ticks, quivers, and tiny lifts of the eyebrow."

• 7. What Actors Are Paid

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  William Shakespeare likely earned 6 shillings per week during his early acting career in 1600s England, a wage comparable to a skilled tradesman of the time. In 2024, the median hourly wage for actors in the United States was $23.33, and full-time actors in Britain earned a median of £22,500 in the same year, a figure the source notes was slightly below the minimum wage. Only 12.7% of SAG-AFTRA members earned enough income to qualify for the union's health plan. At the opposite extreme, film actors such as Aamir Khan and Sandra Bullock have earned tens of millions of dollars for single productions. Union child actors in the United States are paid a daily rate of at least $1,204, though most or all of that income typically goes to parents or legal guardians given the minor's legal status. California's Coogan Act requires 15% of a child actor's earnings to be placed in a blocked trust account, accessible only when the child reaches legal adulthood; Illinois, New York, New Mexico, and Louisiana have enacted similar protections. The gender pay gap within acting is severe. Forbes reported in 2015 that only 21 of the 100 top-grossing films of 2014 featured a female lead or co-lead, and a Forbes analysis of 2013 salaries found that the top-paid male actors made roughly two and a half times what the top-paid actresses made, meaning Hollywood's best-compensated women earned about 40 cents for every dollar the best-compensated men did.

• 8. Across Borders and Traditions

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  Japan's kabuki theatre banned women from performing in the 17th century during the Edo period, creating the onnagata tradition in which men took female roles. That ban ended in the 19th century, and in 1858 Ichikawa Kumehachi became the first actress in kabuki since the prohibition of 1629. By 1882 she had been accepted as a pupil of Ichikawa Danjuro IX and performed under the stage name Ichikawa Masunojo. In the Ottoman Empire, the modern theatre was founded in the 1850s during the Tanzimat era by an Armenian theatre company. Arousyak Papazian made her debut in 1857 as a member of the Hekimian theatre company, reportedly the first female actor to perform in the Ottoman Empire. She worked as a teacher before becoming an actress, performed with the Arevelian Tatron from 1861, and toured to cities including Izmir in 1867. Because the stigma attached to acting was particularly severe for women in that context, Ottoman actresses received a higher salary than their male colleagues. In Egypt in 1870, theater pioneer Yaqub Sanu founded a modern theatre company and found it nearly impossible to recruit Egyptian Muslim women, who were expected to live in seclusion and veil in public. He was ultimately permitted to employ women but only non-Muslim ones; the first Muslim actress in Egypt and the Arab world was Mounira El Mahdeya, who did not appear until 1915. In Russia, the 30th of August 1756 Decree of the Imperial Theatres initiated the first formal recruitment of native Russians into acting. The pioneering group consisted of fourteen men and five women, among them Avdotya Mikhailova, Elizaveta Zorina, Maria Ananyin, Olga Ananyin, and Agrafena Musina-Pushkina.