Actor in 1595: Playhouses, actresses and the slow climb to respectability

From Thespis stepping out of the Athenian chorus to the self-tape era: the professional pretender whose work is to make invented people feel true, take after take. The ancient Greek word for actor was hypokrites — "the answerer" — because the first actor's whole job was to step out of the chorus and answer it as somebody else. Tradition, recorded on the Parian Marble, says a performer named Thespis did exactly that at Athens' City Dionysia around 534 BCE, which is why actors are still called thespians. Every screen performance since is a variation on that one move: standing apart and speaking as a person who does not exist.

Acting is the rare profession with no license, no mandatory degree and no exam anywhere on earth, yet one of the most brutally filtered: the top drama schools admit around one applicant in fifty, and in any given year most union members in the US and UK earn only a small fraction of their income from acting. The economics are winner-take-all to a degree almost no other trade matches — a handful of names earn eight figures per film while the median professional needs a second job.

This page follows the trade from Thespis, the Sanskrit Natya Shastra and Okuni's riverbed kabuki through the Restoration's first actresses, Garrick's naturalism, the birth of the movie star in 1910 and the Method, to the self-tape era and the 2023 strike over artificial intelligence. It covers how people actually get in, what the craft consists of, who reached the top and how, and which parts of the job machines are already taking.