'All the men and women merely players': Why 'actress' isn't being used anymore

Reader Bill Thomas served me up a softball question for last Sunday's column before getting to the meat of his email.

At the risk of his hogging my attention, it's a topic worth exploring in its own column.

Without further ado, the windup aaaand the pitch:

"How did the title 'actor' ever get applied to named women acting on stage and movies? Shouldn't 'actress' be the correct term?" he asked.

Gulp.

"I recognize that an actor is defined as one who acts. An actress is defined as a woman who is an actor," he wrote. "My traditional understanding is that 'actor' was used as the male's title and actress was the female's title. Do we need to designate a different title for men who act?"

This is a difficult topic.

As far as "actors" as a gender-neutral term goes, The Associated Press moved away from it last year, I believe. My 2019 stylebook still distinguishes between "actors" and "actresses."

Daily Herald style has been gender-neutral in reference to police officers and firefighters for decades.

Our changing to the nonspecific "actor" has been a bone of contention for some of our readers. Moving away from "actress" is not an effort to rob women of hard-fought recognition. Rather, it's to make it easier to describe a profession.

"Actor" existed looooong ago to describe someone who does something, whether it be shepherding or cheese-making or lawyering. It wasn't until about 1580 that it came to describe someone who took to the stage to portray a character. The word was not gender-specific then, though large-scale acting itself was.

Even in Shakespeare's day, all of the actors in his plays at the Globe were men. It wasn't until 1661 that women were legally allowed to act on stage in England. That's about the time Helen Hayes was born, to hear the age-obsessed entertainment writers of the 1980s tell it.

But that's all beside the point. Think of "actor" as a broader sea of people who perform on stage, in films and on TikTok videos, no matter their gender.

Fourteen years ago, Ellen Page had a breakout role in "Juno" as a high-schooler grappling with her pregnancy. Ellen Page is now Elliot Page, and while Elliot hasn't gotten any comparable movies since coming out, it's likely only a matter of time.

Laverne Cox's character, hairdresser Sophia Burset, was one of the things that made the Netflix women's prison series "Orange is the New Black" so good.

Both trans man Elliot Page and trans woman Laverne Cox fall under that big "actor" tent. Do we call them "actor" or "actress?" How would the Academy Awards treat them? For which categories would they be nominated?

It's admittedly a lot of work to think all that through - not something traditional as Bill points out - so why not choose to simply describe them by their vocation rather than their gender?

I'm reminded of when people used to refer to guys with RN degrees as "male nurses." Remember the film "Meet the Parents," in which Ben Stiller's character is obsessively (and derisively) referred to as a "male nurse?"

We seemed to have finally grown out of that. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12% of nurses today are men. That might not seem like a lot, but 50 years ago they made up just 2.7%. Male nurses were a curiosity back then, but I doubt few people give it a thought today. It seems many of the nurses I've encountered at hospitals are men.

I expect the same will happen with "actor."

In Act 2, Scene 7 of Shakespeare's comedy "As You Like It," the character Jaques utters the play's most famous line: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Perhaps rather than calling them actors and actresses, we should refer to them as "players."

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.