Actors facing dearth of work during downturn

Pursuing the actor’s path is an all-or-nothing decision, a choice rooted as much in identity as desire. For actors’ actors, doing any other kind of work is simply not an option, even when there’s nothing on the horizon. If starvation is the alternative, they’ll seriously consider it.

“I would go three months without a gig, and then I was on unemployment, and then unemployment would run out,” says Viola Davis — who appears opposite Meryl Streep as the mother of a possible abuse victim in Miramax’s “Doubt.” After she graduated from Juilliard, she found herself living in New York with multiple roommates, “auditioning for everything” and barely scraping by. “At various times, I would live on chicken wings at Chinese restaurants because they were really inexpensive — $1.25 for a package of four or five greasy chicken wings and 80 cents for a quart of white rice — and that’s what I would live on and nothing else. And every once in a while, those three-for-a-dollar vanilla creme sandwich cookies. And that’s hard.”

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