Actor

An actor (or actress for female) is one who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre, and/or in modern mediums such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is ὑποκριτής (hypokrites), literally "one who interprets". The actor's interpretation of their role pertains to the role played, whether based on a real person or fictional character. Interpretation occurs even when the actor is "playing themselves", as in some forms of experimental performance art, or, more commonly; to act, is to create, a character in performance.

Formerly, in some societies, only men could become actors, and women's roles were generally played by men or boys. In modern times, women occasionally played the roles of prepubescent boys.

Terminology

After 1660 in England, when women first started to appear on stage, the terms actor or actress were initially used interchangeably for female performers, but later, influenced by the French actrice, actress became the commonly used term for women in theatre and film. The etymology is a simple derivation from actor with ess added. Within the profession, the re-adoption of the neutral term dates to the 1950–1960s, the post-war period when the contributions of women to cultural life in general were being reviewed.Actress remains the common term used in major acting awards given to female recipients.

Actor model

The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received. The actor model originated in 1973. It has been used both as a framework for a theoretical understanding of computation and as the theoretical basis for several practical implementations of concurrent systems. The relationship of the model to other work is discussed in Indeterminacy in concurrent computation and Actor model and process calculi.

History

According to Carl Hewitt, unlike previous models of computation, the Actor model was inspired by physics, including general relativity and quantum mechanics. It was also influenced by the programming languages Lisp, Simula and early versions of Smalltalk, as well as capability-based systems and packet switching. Its development was "motivated by the prospect of highly parallel computing machines consisting of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of independent microprocessors, each with its own local memory and communications processor, communicating via a high-performance communications network." Since that time, the advent of massive concurrency through multi-core computer architectures has revived interest in the Actor model.

Actors (film)

Actors (original title: Les Acteurs) is a 2000 French comedy film directed by Bertrand Blier.

Plot

A collection of portraits of actors (exclusively men, with the exception of Josiane Balasko interpreting André Dussollier) who meet and tell their stories in a more or less structured manner. They describe their craft with a certain ironic distance.

Cast