The word "role" comes from the French emploi, which means "place, role, position or occupation." In Russian, this word is most often used in relation to theater and cinema actors.
Role in the history of theater
Amplua is a certain category of roles in which this or that artist most often acts.
Usually, the role corresponds to the character of the actor's appearance, his style of play and his other data.
For example, in the broadest sense of the word, the role can be comic or dramatic. This is how the roles of actors were designated, for example, in the ancient Greek theater.
In the Elizabethan theater - in the heyday of the English drama theater (late 16th - early 17th centuries), associated primarily with the work of William Shakespeare, female roles were played by young men. At the same time, the troupes were usually few in number, and during the performance one actor could perform several very different (sometimes even heterosexual) roles. Therefore, the scope of the acting role was understood extremely broadly.
In the theater of the era of classicism, a whole classification of roles was adopted, corresponding to various acting roles.
According to tradition, an actor applying for a particular role had to meet certain requirements, including height, physique, face type, tone of voice, and so on.
An actor of small stature or the owner of a high voice could only claim comic roles. The dramatic hero had to be tall, with regular facial features, with a fairly low timbre of voice.
The classification included the roles of heroines and heroes, lovers and mistresses, kings and tyrants, servants, subretes, confidantes and confidants, ingenue, resonators, fathers, villains, simpletons. It was impossible to move from one role to another. The only exception to this rule is age roles. That is, for example, a performer of heroes, having grown old, could become a “noble father”.
Role in contemporary theater and cinema
Konstantin Stanislavsky and Anton Chekhov believed that the role only limits the development of the actor's individuality and is only a set of cliches.
Today, much more options for a role can be identified, and their boundaries are much more blurred.
It should be borne in mind that the actor does not always perform only within the framework of one specific role. So, for example, some Soviet actors, whom everyone is used to seeing mainly in comic roles - for example, Yevgeny Leonov, Yuri Nikulin, Andrei Mironov - also performed wonderful dramatic roles. Talented film actors easily perform in a variety of genres and characters.
