Actor/Actorette

Following a panel discussion last week about Craig Wright’s world premiere play The Gray Sisters — a work whose four characters are all women — an audience member approached me and asked me why I referred to the women as actors, rather than actresses. She wasn’t miffed; she wasn’t promulgating some ironic post-feminist recidivism. She simply assumed she wasn’t au courant enough to realize that “actor” is now the norm, and hoped for a little more schooling in the ever-shifting vocabulary of newspeak.

But it isn’t the new norm, alas. It’s just so long since I’d uttered the diminutive term “actress” that I no longer hear myself not say it.
Wouldn’t it be great, though, if we could drop this embarrassing anachronism once and for all? Isn’t there something faintly patronizing about gender-specific nouns in general? We live in a culture that’s been quietly dropping such usage over the course of a few hundred years now. Think of poetess, directrix, bachelorette. All terms that suggest there’s something cute about the distinction. The only powerful gender-linked labels I can think off are diva and dominatrix, and let’s face it, both these come with heady connotations.

It’s my belief that “actress” persists almost entirely because of the Academy Awards. No one wants to see half as many acting Oscars parceled out, after all. But more importantly, acting is not a level playing field; how many award-worthy roles are written for women each year, compared to bravura roles for men? So the distinction is not mere, not in that case. And thus it persists.
Besides, the phrase “Best Female Actor in a Leading Role” does not come trippingly off the tongue, does it. And yet I hope to hear it introduced some time before this century is out.