Actors who don't eat at Prego or Balthazar, but who eat pizza in a rehearsal hall or a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter at midnight after getting back, too tired to cook, from an evening performance. Actors who start off dreaming of doing Hamlet or Cordelia in the West End, and end up dreaming of doing Lear or Gertrude anywhere, and in between live out of suitcases across the country for an entire career of vulnerable auditions, drafty rehearsals, opening-night jitters and tearful, closing-night good-byes.

Actors who have worked their way through the eternity of summer stock and the brief runs of winter, who have weathered both the stinging truths and the wildly unfair misjudgments of critics, who have approached the classics with the care and focus of surgeons preparing for a difficult operation, and who -- a few weeks later, wrapped in sweaters and living on coffee and cigarettes -- have bravely thrown themselves into the rehearsals of some young playwright's improbable, but dramatically exciting experiment.

Actors who always weep -- partly out of sentiment, partly out of sheer professional admiration -- when they watch ...A Christmas Carol, or hear Send in the Clowns, or listen to that battered old trouper Judy Garland belt out Over the Rainbow. Actors who, trying to find their marks in the pre-curtain darkness, have got their spears stuck in a styrofoam Roman column, or who have taken a particularly wide step while climbing the plywood ramparts at Elsinore and have heard the loud, unmistakable sound of Danish breeches ripping from codpiece to hindmost. Or who, in the very middle of a Lady Bracknell to end all Lady Bracknells, have stood, frozen, stage right, as Algernon inexplicably shifts gears into a speech from Charley's Aunt. Oh, the stories actors can tell, and do, and usually rather well.

These are people who have bowed to packed audiences in big cities and small towns, and who have soldiered on through the dead aid of an almost empty house and the polite, isolated clapping of a looming failure. They learn more about triumph and disaster in a single season than most of us do in a lifetime. They do commercials to pay the bills. They fall in and out of love on an endless tour of a recycled Broadway hit that is as lucrative as it is tedious. And while they're away from their home apartments, their phones are disconnected and all their plants die.

They hope for the role of Falstaff, but also find there are entire worlds to explore n playing Bardolph or Pistol or -- if it comes to that, and if it means a season and something resembling a steady income -- in being a retainer, or an attendant, or a beadle, or a groom.

The work, the work, the work. Who among us throw themselves with more whole hearted passion, more commitment, more disregard for practical concerns and more undiminished, ever optimistic hope than an actor? Not many.

David Macfarlane is the author of The Danger Tree and Summer Gone. (You can order from here). This article is excerpted from a column which appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail. From the July/August issue of Equity News