Preparation for an acting career

People are always asking if they need to go to acting school or college to be an actor. A similar question is if they should major in theatre when they go to college. The answer to all these questions is NO. Actors do not have to go to acting school or college. What they need is the unique combination of superior ability, interesting look, personality, and knowlege of the the business of acting. With those resources someone can seek an acting career without he enormous cost and waste of time of higher education. If someone is an actor, they will be doing that without having to be schooled in it. Professional actors should go to classes to network more than to study acting. There is a big difference between a student of acting and an actor. Actors are much more rare than students of acting. Too many young people think that they can become actors by reading books on acting and going to acting classes. While it does not necessarily do any harm to read books and go to classes, it can be a way of avoiding the real world that an aspiring actor faces. This is where his personality comes in. The aspiring actor needs to be a good self starter, willing to face hardships and rejection, and be persistent. These personality traits are absolutely necessary to support ones acting talent. The aspiring actor has to go out and scratch and dig and scramble to find auditions and an agent. Such things do not come easily and it may take an entire lifetime to get anywhere at it.