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Mencken on actors, from Prejudices Second Series below. I love the description of actors: “ awalking artificiality, strutting dummy, thematic catalogue of imbecilities!”

“The Cerebral Mime Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality. His alleged intelligence, of course, is always purely imaginary: no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night. That nonsense enters into the very fiber of the actor. He becomes a grotesque boiling down of all the preposterous characters that he has ever impersonated. Their characteristics are seen in his manner, in his reactions to stimuli, in his point of view. He becomes a walking artificiality, a strutting dummy, a thematic catalogue of imbecilities.”

Incidentally Truman Capote thought them a dumb lot also. Capote on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson

Carson: “Oh c’mon, you can’t mean all actors are stupid?”

Capote: “Yes, I mean all actors are stupid.

Carson: “Well, what about Jill St. John? She supposedly has an IQ of 140.”

Capote: “That’s easy. She’s a terrible actress.”

I think the relative intelligence of actors is the same as any group. You have some who are highly intelligent and you have some who are dumber then a box of hammers. What I think they both need to remember is that what they do is subjective.

What I may perceive is most likely different then what another perceives. I love to read, but I always hated Lit class. Let me explain. I want to read and embrace a book from my perspective. I don't care to hear what "it actually" meant until I have had time to digest it myself.