Actors

a person who in stage plays, motion pictures, television broadcasts, etc.
a person who does something; partic-p-nt.
a brother of king augeas, sometimes believed to be the father, by molione, of eurytus and cteatus.
contemporary examples

the actors perform these scenes for four, sometimes six hour, stints and are “exhausted,” he adds, by the end of their shifts.
s-x, blood, and screaming: blackout’s dark frights tim teeman october 6, 2014

precious is a film with actors who are not all seasoned actors, that is extremely dark and extremely ghetto.
early oscar bets the daily beast october 3, 2009

over the course of 55 days, the actors faced severe conditions.
game of gold rush anna brand january 1, 2014

in a couple of hours, the actors will show up on set in new york expecting script revisions.
‘white collar’ creator jeff eastin: my biggest con jeff eastin july 9, 2012

hollywood bestows trophies on movies and actors and the general public responds with a resounding “wtf!?”
the worst oscar winners, from ‘rocky’ and ‘crash’ to gwyneth paltrow kevin fallon, marlow stern february 25, 2014

historical examples

the scenes were furnished from the london, the actors from the brigade.
the british expedition to the crimea william howard russell

there are a few who are so perfect that they do not seem to be actors at all.
the story of the malakand field force sir winston s. churchill

to her brother’s beverley, she played the wife, in a way which affected the actors as much as it did the audience.
their majesties’ servants (volume 3 of 3) john doran

though i believe one reason of their depravity is the badness of the actors.
joseph andrews, vol. 2 henry fielding

the fact is nowhere dwelt upon for the purpose of exalting the actors.
the pre-columbian discovery of america by the northmen b. f. de costa

noun
a person who acts in a play, film, broadcast, etc
(informal) a person who puts on a false manner in order to deceive others (often in the phrase bad actor)
n.

late 14c., “an overseer, guardian, steward,” from latin actor “an agent or doer,” also “theatrical player,” from past participle stem of agere (see act (n.)). mid-15c. as “a doer, maker,” also “a plaintiff.” sense of “one who performs in plays” is 1580s, originally applied to both men and women.

noun

an athlete who is good at pretending he has been hurt or fouled; esp, a baseball player who very convincingly mimes the pain of being hit by a pitch

related terms

bad actor
theory
a model for concurrency by carl hewitt. actors are autonomous and concurrent objects which execute asynchronously. the actor model provides flexible mechanisms for building parallel and distributed software systems.
(http://osl.cs.uiuc.edu/).
[“laws for communicating parallel processes”, c. hewitt et al, ifip 77, pp. 987-992, n-h 1977].
[“actors: a model of concurrent computation in distributed systems”, gul a. agha , cambridge press, ma, 1986].
(1999-11-23)