François Delsarte creates a manual for acting, explaining how appearances and actions can convey particular emotions.

One of the very first film "actors" is Fred Ott, an assistant of Thomas Edison. Appearing in Fred Ott's Sneeze and Fred Ott Holding a Bird, the earliest films on record at the Library of Congress, he is not so much an actor as a subject, performing the simple actions of the titles.

Konstantin Stanislavky cofounds the Moscow Art Theatre. During his life, he develops a style of acting known as the System; this style requires actors to create their roles by working from the inside out. That is, rather than basing their characters on costume and makeup, they must use their own experiences to convey emotion and realism.

Clément Maurice's Hamlet (Le Duel d'Hamlet) begins the film career of stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. However, this was before a more representational form of acting had been created for movies. As in Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton's Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, 1912), Bernhardt's exaggerated actions and facial expressions look quite unrealistic.

La Société Film d'Art (Art Film Society) is founded to create serious artistic cinema—to legitimize the medium and raise it to the aesthetic level of theater. The Art Film Society later joins forces with the Comédie Français, the prestigious French national theater.

D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms stars Lillian Gish, who, under Griffith's guidance, studies the movements of ordinary people and incorporates them into her style. Giving the first great film performance, playing an adolescent who is beaten to death by her father, Gish delivers her last scene so convincingly that it shocks the film crew, Griffith included.

Hollywood studios have complete control over actors, whom they can even force to get cosmetic surgery.

Sound films are introduced. The technology opens up many cinematic possibilities, but poses problems for (and even destroys the careers of) actors with unappealing voices or unable to adjust to new modes of filmmaking.

Stepin Fetchit has a supporting role in John M. Stahl's In Old Kentucky. Fetchit is the first African American film actor to receive billing.

Rouben Mamoulian's Applause uses overlapping dialogue recorded with two microphones; its sound is mixed in postproduction.

George W. Hill's The Big House, the first winner of the Academy Award for Sound Recording, is characterized by its excellent use of discordant sound, from the voices of the inmates to the loud noises of machinery to complete silence in solitary confinement.

Bertolt Brecht directs the short film A Man's a Man (Mann ist Mann). According to Brecht, a theatrical or film production should maintain complete distance from the audience. As opposed to Stanislavsky, he wants acting to appear completely alien to real life.

Actors found the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in response to producers' cutbacks and Depression-era working conditions.

Vsevolod Pudovkin, a Soviet film director, publishes his book Film Acting, one of the first serious books on the subject. He advocates the use of Stanislavsky's System and stresses the need for directors and actors to work together to make out-of-sequence shooting look as real as possible when edited.

Lee Strasberg cofounds the Actors Studio in New York. Influenced by the teachings of Stanislavsky, he creates the Method, a style that also requires actors to behave in ways true to real life. Strasberg is a major proponent of the use of affective memories—usually painful past experiences—to achieve certain effects in acting. A number of well-known actors use the Method, including Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dennis Hopper, and Dustin Hoffman.

Bette Davis, a movie star during the reign of the studios, gives perhaps her greatest performance in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. Davis spent much of her career fighting the studios and demanding better roles. After breaching her contract at Warner Bros. in the 1930s by quitting, she eventually returned to work having gained what she had asked for.

Caucasian actor Marlon Brando plays a Japanese man named Sakini in Daniel Mann's Teahouse of the August Moon. For decades, the film industry has tended to cast white actors in foreign roles, including Asian ones. Yellowface is quite common during this period. Other examples include Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Katharine Hepburn as Jade in Harold S. Bucquet and Jack Conway's Dragonseed (1944).

Many of the actors in Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes have their faces heavily covered in latex ape makeup. To convey the proper amount of emotion, the actors exaggerate their facial expressions.

Jeff Kleiser coins the term synthespian, referring to digitally created characters, when using them in his short film Sextone for President.

Actor/comedian Robin Williams is the voice actor for the Genie in Ron Clements and John Musker's animated film Aladdin. Star power helps make the film a hit, beginning a trend of "big name" actors doing voice acting for animated movies.

Robert Altman's The Player, a satirical look at the Hollywood industry, is perhaps the ultimate cameo movie, featuring sixty-five appearances by recognizable actors and personalities.

Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction allows actor John Travolta to "reinvent" himself. Primarily known as a dance/musical actor from films such as John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Randall Kleiser's Grease (1978), Travolta shows his versality by playing a quirky hitman/gangster.

Actor John Malkovich has the unique opportunity to play a version of himself in Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich.

Portraying actor/comedian Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman's biographical film Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey radically immerses himself in his character, refusing to be called by his own name, acting the part on and off the set.

Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within takes the concept of the "synthespian" to a new level, with extremely realistic computer-generated people.