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# How Actors Got Ideas Above Their Station
- URL: https://goodoil.news/how-actors-got-ideas-above-their-station/
- Published: 2026-09-21T02:30:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T02:30:55.000Z
- Description: From infamia to Instagram: and back again, if we’re lucky.
- Author: Lushington Brady
- Tags: History, Culture

“Ain’t social change amazing?” rock band TISM once asked lyrically. One astonishing social change in the West over the past century or so, which we have barely noticed, has been the complete turnaround in the reputations of actors. For centuries, millennia even, right up to the dawn of the 20th century, actors were not, it must be said, well regarded.

The Romans loved the theatre as much as anybody – but they still held actors in extremely low regard. *Infamia* was the term: public disgrace. Actors were often grouped with others who attracted the stigma of infamia, including gladiators and prostitutes. An actor could not vote, hold office, testify or serve. Paid performance was unfit for a freeman. Mime was indecent. Nudity and sex work were part of the wage packet.

As Christianity became the official religion of Rome, the infamy of actors continued under a new social rubric. The theatre was rehearsed lies. With male actors playing all roles, including female, the cross-dressing was seen as a gateway drug to sodomy. Wandering acting troupes were just another mob of flea-bitten vagrants. In early modern times, even the playwrights often disliked the performing monkeys parroting their words. **Shakespeare** and **Jonson** complained that actors wrecked the verse with spectacle and improvisation. **Dryden** shook his fist at English tragedians who died so badly the house laughed.

That stain continued well into modern times. The Victorians firmly believed that the stage and the bordello went together like a donkey and a randy mulatto. And not without reason: social stigma and financial insecurity drove some actors to make a living on their backs as much as on stage. Even in the 20th century, celebrities such as **Billie Holiday**, **Maya Angelou**, **Rupert Everett**, and **Amanda Palmer**, were all known to supplement their incomes as prostitutes, madams, rentboys or strippers.

So, when and how did actors become – as they so clearly see themselves – the moral and intellectual exemplars of society? And have we simply had enough of their posturing?

America changed the temperature. In a country where money could buy what birth once reserved, industrialists built opera houses to launder themselves as *cultured* robber-barons, and successful players were admitted to the middle class. Enlightenment and Romanticism recast acting as exploration of the soul rather than a cheap trick. **Sarah Bernhardt** founded a company and aired opinions.

Hollywood ramped everything up. **Charlie Chaplin** and **Mary Pickford** stepped out from behind the characters, moralising for all they were worth. Then Chaplin’s chasing after a conga-line of teenaged totty and **Fatty Arbuckle**’s deadly dalliance with a starlet showed what was going on beneath the self-appointed pulpits.

So the Hays Code put the debauchery of early Hollywood on a leash – at least in public. The studio system made sure that what went happened in Bel Air stayed there. Studios paid millions, built mansions and invented the star as product. **Archibald Leach** became **Cary Grant**. **Norma Jeane** became **Marilyn**. Morality clauses covered marriage, drink, politics and anything that might frighten the Midwestern box office.

The deal was simple: look good, sound good and keep your mouth shut.

The end of the studio system after the war let actors off the leash and the advent of television brought actors into the living room. People who were once safely remote on the silver screen were suddenly in millions of homes, like neighbours dropping by and bringing their ill-informed opinions with them, like that after-dinner boor telling the whole table what was what.

By the ’60s, thespian sermonising was in full swing. **Marlon Brando** marched – and sent a fake Indian to berate **John Wayne** and **John Huston**. **Hanoi Jane** sat on an anti-aircraft gun like it was **Ho Chi Minh**’s all-pleasuring phallus. The lecturing and hectoring was non-partisan, too: the Duke rode a tank into Harvard and Bonzo went to the White House. At the same time, Watergate, televangelists and the church’s own scandals emptied the pews. Celebrity immediately occupied the new electronic pulpits.

They haven’t shut up since. In fact, they’ve only got more strident – and ignorant. Suddenly, we have a whole bunch of ignoramuses who flunked out of theatre school fer chrissakes, telling us they’re the repositories of all wisdom. **Meryl Streep** prates about a ‘gender pay gap’ that’s about as real as her Australian accent. **Leo DiCaprio** preaches climate doom from a private jet and discards girlfriends at age 25\. **Kim Kardashian** lobbies for things she can barely spell.

Not all actors are quite so vocally ignorant, of course. The few quiet ones do good work without turning it into a vanity project: **Katharine Hepburn** with UNICEF, **Keanu Reeves** privately donating millions to cancer research and children’s hospitals. **Robin Williams** including riders in his contracts to employing homeless people as cast and crew. **Gary Sinise** flying the children of veterans to Disneyland.

Unlike the loudmouth activists, those are the ones remembering **Jesus**’ injunction against blowing their own trumpets. As AC/DC’s **Brian Johnson** put it: donate your money and shut the fuck up.

The rest discovered social media – and the rest of us discovered just how much we loathe celebrity ‘opinions’.

As **Rachel Zegler**, **Amber Heard** and **Cynthia Erivo** learned the hard way, a single tweet can sink a picture. The public, having endured half a century of being lectured by people whose only talent is faking a few emotions and parroting words someone else wrote, are, more and more, telling actors to just do their little dance and shut up.

Because otherwise, AI will do it for them – and AI doesn’t prance around in a keffiyeh.

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