Actor in 1603: Okuni invents kabuki on a Kyoto riverbed

The spread is wider than almost any other profession. The US median was $20.50 an hour in 2023, and most union members earn only a few thousand dollars a year from acting, while a handful of stars are reported to make $20 million or more per film. Germany is the exception: its subsidized state theatres pay ensemble actors a salaried minimum of about €3,000 a month.

A family of American techniques descended from Konstantin Stanislavski's system, developed most famously by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio from 1947, which asks actors to draw on personal memory and lived experience to generate real emotion. It is often confused with staying in character between takes — a publicity-friendly habit some actors adopt, but not what Strasberg, or rivals like Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner, actually taught.

How do actors memorize so many lines? Mostly not by rote. Research by psychologists Helga and Tony Noice, who studied professional actors for decades, found that actors absorb dialogue by analyzing why a character says each line — the goal behind the words — so the meaning retrieves the text. Lines are also anchored to movement and to the scene partner's cues, which is why actors ask to run lines aloud rather than silently rereading them.