Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress Biography

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On the other hand, it points up the limits of language neutrality and the unique qualities of the acting profession, raising questions with particular resonance in this long season of awards.

The feminine suffix, it is argued, carries an unnecessarily frilly air, suggesting a subsidiary relationship to man's work. But if "actress" is, for some, as fusty and quaint a term as "authoress," it's also a word whose history reflects the obstructed road women traveled to reach the footlights. Acting was, for centuries, a profession restricted to men and boys. However well observed Shakespeare's Desdemona or Lady Macbeth, it fell upon the shoulders of male performers to strut and fret those characters' hour upon the stage.

In a convulsive late-17th century shift -- dramatized in the 2004 feature "Stage Beauty" -- the Restoration opened the stage doors of the English theater to women (they'd already made their entrances in Italy and France). At that point they were known as actors, along with their male counterparts. It would be several decades before the word "actress" appeared -- 1700, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, more than a century after the word "actor" was first used to denote a theatrical performer, supplanting the less professional-sounding "player." (In Japan, it wasn't until the early 20th century that the equivalent of "actress" replaced the phrase for "female player.")

"Actress," it turned out, was not always the kindest of labels: It affirmed a woman's vocation but also could be used to question her morals. Actors in general, of course, were often regarded with suspicion for breaking the workaday mold. But a particular sense of Puritan horror clung to the notion of women performing publicly -- and to the name of their newly legitimized position. In the first recorded use of the word "actress," playwright John Dryden evoked "the trade of love behind the scene, where actresses make bold with married men." With this double-edged sword I dub thee Actress and denigrate the work.

The work itself is at the heart of contemporary objections to that name -- matters of professional respect and equality. As Zoe Wanamaker told the BBC in 2005, an awareness arose among the acting community in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Britain, of the need to repudiate the term's stigma. "The name 'actress' seemed to have this connotation of being a prostitute," she said.

Fiona Shaw countered that because of the relative dearth of roles for women, "a young actress' life is entirely different to an actor's, and I don't see any diminishment of status in being called an actress as opposed to an actor -- if anything, the badge of shame is the badge of pride because it's a much tougher job!"

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress

Actor Or Actress