, a Polish-American actress, by
Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz, 1880. Formerly, in some societies, only men could become actors. Women appearing on stage in public have been viewed as controversial, provocative and not respectable, and male actors often played the female roles in plays. In Europe and elsewhere, there have been periods of women being barred from acting or placed in restricted roles. In
ancient Greece and
ancient Rome and the
medieval world, it was considered disgraceful for a woman to go on stage. Nevertheless, women did perform in Ancient Rome, and again entered the stage in the
Commedia dell'arte in Italy in the 16th century; in 1562,
Lucrezia Di Siena became the perhaps first professional actress since Ancient Rome. France and Spain also had female actors in the 16th century. In William Shakespeare's England, however, women's roles were generally played by men or boys. The profession of acting seemingly died out in late antiquity.
Middle ages During the Middle Ages, a broad spectrum of genres of theatre were performed. These genres included
mystery plays,
morality plays,
farces and
masques. The actors performing in the medieval theatre genres were normally not professional actors. Rather, they were amateurs who were temporarily engaged to perform a role in a production staged on a temporary basis during some sort of festivity. The amateurs engaged to perform in religious plays were typically drawn from their sponsoring church congregations, and the common thing was to engage men to perform also the female parts. However, women were not explicitly banned, and there were cases in which women were appointed to play. In 1514, for example, women were engaged to perform all the female roles in the Bozen Passion Play in the city of
Bolzano. During the entry of king
Henri II and
Catherine de Medici to Lyon in 1548, the tragicomedy
La Calandria by
Bernardo Dovizi was performed by both male and female actors from Italy, of which
Brantome noted that it was "very well performed by the actors and actresses, who were very beauiful, spoke very well, and were extremely graceful".
Jerónima de Burgos performed with her husband in the theater company of Alonso de Cisneros and Jerónimo Velázquez, touring Portugal as well as Spain during the 1590s; and
Micaela de Luján (c. 1570–1614) became the role model for Carmila Lucinda by
Lope de Vega; all of them worked as actresses during the 1590s. In France, women appear to have performed in the travelling theater companies early on during the 16th century, though the exact time the first actress appeared is hard to determine. Prior to the establishment of the first permanent theatre in Paris, the actors of the travelling theatre companies are not well documented regardless of their sex. While professional French actresses were reportedly active in France in the second half of the 16th century, they are seldom mentioned by name and then normally only very briefly. Nine contemporary actresses beside Marie Vernier are briefly mentioned: Jeanne Crevé, Judith Le Messier, Elisabeth Diye, Mlle Dufresne, Isabelle Paquette Le Gendre, Francoise Petit, Marguerite Dugoy, Renée Berenger and
Rachel Trepeau, but only Marie Vernier and Rachel Trepeau are documented to any large degree.
Marie Vernier, known also as
Mlle La Porte, was the leading lady and co-director of
Valleran-Lecomte's theatre company, which performed in
Hôtel de Bourgogne in
Paris and toured the country and the
Spanish Netherlands from a least 1604 onward. The debut of women on stage in Germany appear to have taken place the same year. In September 1655, "female players" are noted to have been performed in
Frankfurt for the first time. Under
Magister Velthen and his father-in-law
Carl Andreas Paulsen, the first actresses were employed in Germany. Velthens wife
Catharina Elisabeth Velten acted with her mother and sister on stage in first in her father's and then in her husband's theater, the
Hochdeutsche Hofcomödianten, and after her husband's death, she managed his theater and continued his policy of employing women. England was late in introducing women on the stage compared to the rest of Western Europe. In the first half of the 17th century, women were still not allowed on the English stage. The English audience were first introduced to female actors by visiting foreign theatre companies. The perhaps first actress to perform in England was the Italian actress
Angelica Martinelli, a member of a visiting Italian Commedia dell'arte company, who performed in England as early as 1578. The rare occurrence of foreign actresses during visits by foreign theatre companies, however, did not result in an English reform, and there were no professional native English actresses. In November 1629, a French theatre company was allowed to make a guest appearance at the
Blackfriars Theatre in London, during which the actresses were "hissed, booed and pippin - pelted from the stage". When an eighteen-year
Puritan prohibition of
drama was lifted after the
English Restoration of 1660, women began to appear on stage in England.
Margaret Hughes is often credited as the first professional actress on the English stage. The prohibition against female actors ended during the reign of
Charles II in part because he enjoyed watching actresses on stage. Specifically, Charles II issued
letters patent to
Thomas Killigrew and
William Davenant, granting them the
monopoly right to form two London theatre companies to perform "serious" drama, and the letters patent were reissued in 1662 with revisions allowing actresses to perform for the first time. In rest of Europe, the debut of women actors came later. However, this was normally not because of a ban on female actors, as had been the case in Western Europe, but rather because Northern and Eastern Europe came late in establishing a national theater with professional native actors of their own. In Northern and Eastern Europe, foreign actresses appeared onstage decades before there were any native actors of any gender. One example of this was Sweden. There was never any ban for women performing on the stage in Sweden, and women appear to have performed on stage as soon as the first foreign theatre companies, that included women members, visited Sweden. In 1653, a Dutch theatre company performed at the royal court of
queen Christina; this theatre company included female members -
Ariana Nozeman,
Elisabeth de Baer and
Susanna van Lee who are believed to have been the likely first actresses to perform in Sweden. However, Sweden relied on foreign theatre companies for a long time and it took decades after the 1650s until native Swedish actresses appeared. The first national theatre to employ professional native actors, the
Kungliga svenska skådeplatsen was inaugurated at the
Stora Bollhuset in 1737; it is noted to have employed three female actors from the start, one of whom being
Beata Sabina Straas. In Russia, the first theatre was founded in Moscow by the Tsar in 1672. This theatre did employ women actors, but all actors were foreigners (mainly German). The following decades, many foreign theater companies, mainly from Italy, France and Germany, were active in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. However, it was not until the 30th August 1756 Decree of the
Imperial Theatres that native Russians were, for the first time, recruited to be educated in acting. The pioneer group of Russian actors consisted of fourteen men - Grigorij Jemeljanov, Pavel Ivanov, Kozma Lukjanov, Fjodor Maksimov, Evstafij Grigorjev, Luka Ivanov, Prokofij Prikaznyj, Fjodor Volkov, Grigorij Volkov, Ivan Dmitrevskij, Aleksej Popov, Gavrila Volkov, Jakov Sjumskij and Michail Tjulkov - and five women;
Avdotya Mikhailova, Elizaveta Zorina, Maria Ananyin, Olga Ananyin and
Agrafena Musina-Pushkina. In Poland-Lithuania, Italian, French and German theatre and opera companies had performed at the royal court since the 16th century. The first public theatre, the
National Theatre, Warsaw, was founded in 1765, and the first pioneering group of native Polish actors were employed and trained to perform there. Women were members of this pioneer acting groupe from the start, and
Antonina Prusinowska and
Wiktoria Leszczyńska is credited as the first two native female actors in Poland. In some cases, this did not occur until the 19th century. After the independence of Greece in 1830, a great interest in theatre flourished in Greece. Initially amateur theatre, a professional theatre developed, and the first modern permanent theatre in Athens, the
Boukoura Theatre, was founded in 1840. In professional theatre, women's roles were initially played by men or by foreign (Italian) actresses. The first Greek actress being
Maria Angeliki Tzivitza, who performed in the Boukoura Theatre on 24 November 1840, and retired after two performances. In September 1842, N. Skoufos,
Dimitrios Levidis,
Alexandros Rizos Rangavis and
Grigoris Kampouroglou founded the Athenian Theatre Committee or Society of Theatre with the intent to educate professional Greek actors in Athens. Male actors were swiftly hired, but it was difficult to find women because the profession was not considered respectable for women.
Ekaterina Panayotou signed her contract for the Society of Theatre in Athens on 8 November 1842 and became the first female actor hired, followed by
Athena Filipaki, Marigo Defteridi and Marigo Domestini. She has the distinction of being the first professional Greek actress with formal training.
East Asian theatre In Japan,
onnagata, or men taking on female roles, were used in
kabuki theatre when women were banned from performing on stage in the 17th century during the
Edo period; this ban ended in the 19th century. In 1858,
Ichikawa Kumehachi made her debut and became the first actress in
kabuki theatre since the ban on female actors in 1629, and thus acting as a profession was reintroduced for women in Japan. In 1882, she was accepted as a pupil of
Ichikawa Danjūrō IX and took the stage name Ichikawa Masunojō. Western modern theater was introduced in Japan in the late 19th century during the
Meiji era, with
Kawakami Otojirō as a prominent theater pioneer, and his wife, the geisha and dancer
Sada Yacco, who had already performed in under ground Kabui theater in the 1880s, made her debut as a stage actress of modern Western theater in 1890s. In China, there were several forms of drama, theater and opera. There were never a full ban on women performing onstage, rather the regulations differed depending on which form of drama was performed on stage. In some forms of Chinese drama such as
Beijing opera, men traditionally performed all the roles, including female roles, while in
Shaoxing opera women often play all roles, including male ones. In India, women as well as male actors performed in the
Sanskrit theatre during antiquity. The modern theater was introduced in India as an amateur theatre in the 1850s and became commersial in the 1870s, when the first indigenous Indian actress in modern theater made her debut on stage.
Binodini Dasi began her acting career in 1875 at the age of twelve in the
Bengali theatre, a domain traditionally dominated by men, and achieved widespread fame for her portrayals of mythological and historical female characters.
Middle East , an
Armenian actress, believed to be the first professional female actor in Middle East In the 1850s, the modern theatre was founded in the
Ottoman Empire during the
Tanzimat era by an Armenian theatre company, and
Arousyak Papazian was reportedly the first female actor to perform onstage, making her debut in 1857 as a member in the Hekimian theatre company, where she was engaged in 1857–1859. Before becoming an actress, she worked as a teacher. From 1861, she was engaged at the
Arevelian Tatron (Oriental Theater) and she also toured with the company, such as to
İzmir in 1867. As Muslims did not consider acting a suitable profession for a woman, who were expected to live in
harem sex segregation, the first actors in the Ottoman Empire were Christian Armenians; and as the stigma of the profession was especially severe for women, the actresses received a higher salary than their male colleagues, and they could also continue their careers undisturbed after the Armenian theatre monopoly was abolished in the Ottoman Empire in 1879. Yaqub Sanu was allowed to employ women to act on stage since it was seen as necessary, but he was forced to engage non-Muslim women. He was eventually able to employ two poor Jewish girls:
Milia Dayan and her sister. The Dayan sisters are known as the first actresses in the Arab world alongside
Miriam Samat, Warda Milan, Mathilde Nagga and the sisters Ibriz Estati and Almaz Estati, all of whom were non-Muslim women.
Modern roles at the
2015 Screen Actors Guild Awards. An
EGOT winner, Davis was named by
Time as one of the most influential people in the world in both 2012 and 2017. In modern times, women occasionally play the roles of boys or young men. For example, the stage role of
Peter Pan is traditionally played by a woman, as are most
principal boys in British
pantomime.
Opera has several "
breeches roles" traditionally sung by women, usually
mezzo-sopranos. Examples are Hansel in
Hänsel und Gretel,
Cherubino in
The Marriage of Figaro and Octavian in
Der Rosenkavalier. In the 2000s, women playing men in live theatre is particularly common in presentations of older plays, such as
Shakespearean works with large numbers of male characters in roles where gender is inconsequential. ==Compensation==