How did acting go from a profession considered to be on par with prostitution throughout the 1600s to the pinnacle of glamorous celebrity today? True, super-famous actors are the minority of actors, but they are the majority of famous people recalled by most people. When, exactly,  did acting become a respectable profession with its merits tied to individuals in a way that led them to stardom?

There are many eras and potential factors to be considered in examining this cultural shift. I might examine the effects film had on this progression, as well as the changing attitudes of the Victorian era. I could go back further, citing Shakespeare and the Puritans, examining the ways people looked at acting in a time when theater was first being catapulted from a bawdy street corner entertainment to a show fit for a queen.

I’ll also be able to examine the pay of actors and the ways they were recruited and auditioned in different eras, and how this compared to how much they were respected and admired in society. How much were famous actors paid, and how did that change with the creation if film stars? While plays only pay as long as the actor works, films keep paying. How has that shift impacted the way actors are paid and viewed as established cultural entities? Even before film, stage acting crept out of shame into a certain limelight. Did seeing actors’ names and images in papers and theaters make them respectable? Or did being respectable make them well-known? The media and advertisement of theater, as well as the different sorts of work actors took on and the sorts of people that became actors, definitely impacted this shift. The most mysterious step in the process, I believe, is going from near-nameless actors to those that were household names. I’ll examine the way audiences went from expecting an anonymous portrayal of a character to an iconic individual mark of the craft.

Fine acting is obviously a great artistic skill, but, even when other artists were also looked down upon, theatre was often treated worst of all the arts. The cultural paradigm shift from despising the actor to embracing the actor’s stardom isn’t just a reflection of technological and social changes. It also reflects the way we think about the self, and about the ability to be other people. I would be able to analyze the moral values of different decades relating to the self, and how these correlated to treatment of actors. This seems like an exciting topic spanning some interesting historical periods and I cannot wait to explore it further.