Acting was once a marginal occupation. In Shakespeare’s time, actors were considered not much better than vagabonds, and even into the 20th century the profession carried a faint whiff of scandal, especially for women. It’s not hard to understand why. Acting, after all, is a form of deception, and an actor is a chameleon who can be a king one week and a brain surgeon the next. You never know where you are with actors. But I have always envied them because they seem so much more lifelike than the rest of us, and so much better at performing themselves. But how can we amateurs compete with no training, no script and no direction? This envy of actors must be almost universal. A few were already famous in back the 19 th century but only in the 20 th century, with the arrival of movies, did they become superhuman. The tiny figure on a distant stage suddenly became a demigod on a movie screen twenty feet high, with an amplified voice to match. With special effects he or she could do anything