I still haven t made my mind up on the question, although I suspect that the tide is so strongly wit

I ve had a certain amount of comment on my previous post about the  actor vs actress  question. In particular it s been brought to my attention that male actors don t always play male roles and female actors don t always play female roles (pantomimes, mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl authentic Shakespeare productions in which all the parts are played by men or boys, or productions which use cross-gender casting, e.g. Frances de la Tour playing Hamlet). mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl Fair enough, although it s nevertheless mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl true that these cases are exceptional: generally, an actor could be defined as someone who specialises in male roles and an actress could be defined as someone who specialises in female roles if that makes sense then there would be a good and non-sexist reason for having separate terms. I do think it s always worth asking what is the motive, the agenda behind having mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl a separate term, and when it is to imply that the male version is the norm (this is clearly the case with silly coinages like  poetess)  then I m against it; but it does seem possible at least in principle to have sex-specific mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl terms because mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl they refer to real differences, without implying the superiority of one over the other (after mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl all,  man  and  woman  are sex-specific terms, and no one is arguing that they should be replaced by a single sex-neutral term).
I m informed by my friend Bruce Dessau that Roberrt Elms was talking about this on BBC Radio London today, arguing strongly for the abolition of  actress.  Among the arguments he advanced was that no one says  paintress  for female mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl painters but I think I ve dealt with that one in my remarks above: female painters don t necessarily paint different subjects from male painters, whereas female actors usually do play different roles from male actors.  He also said that if you referred to a woman as the best actress mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl in the world this would only mean the best at acting among women; how could you make the claim that she was the best at acting out of everyone in he world without the gender-neutral term  actor?  That s a fair point.
I still haven t made my mind up on the question, although I suspect that the tide is so strongly with  actor  for both sexes that I ll end up switching to it and feeling fine about that. In the meantime, though, my review has gone off with the word  actress  in it. Bruce says that if he used  actress  in a review for the Guardian the subs would automatically correct it. It ll be interesting to see whether the subs at the Sindie do the same. Review appears on Easter mercedes benz cruise control repairs 380sl Sunday.
Yeah, but couldn t you then argue for even more specificity? I mean, black actors are almost always cast in black rôles, fat actors play fat guys, Tony Cox isn t going to get many parts that weren t written for a dwarf, then we d end up with all kinds of words. But really, shouldn t an actor just be someone who acts? Then if you wanted to specify male or female actors, you could just say: male actors, female actors.