It is at times like this I wish I had actually finished my Phd (sadly, in the end, I ditched it for a variety of personal reasons), but I am, nonetheless, an actor who has had the honour of studying at world class academic institutions for over a decade, and has delivered keynote papers to e.g. The Institute for Historical Research, and was sponsered for much of my research period by the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am very proud of these past achievements, although I do think that, as an actor, you have to forgo most of the analysis and just go with your initiative - which may be why many good actors actually dropped out of formal education quite young, and devoted themselves instead to getting work. Some actors are very intellectual (I remember reading that David Duchovny was also a Phd student who disowned his PhD for the sake of performing); some are totally intuitive, and came to acting after time spent on the streets, in prison or remand, in mental institutions etc. All of them have a claim to be good actors, whose life experiences inform their performance style and mode of expression.
On the other hand, I suspect there is not really any such thing as a 'dumb' actor - no-one who acts well who hasn't got a very strong grasp of how to empathise with other people, how to imagine themselves living the life experience of somebody else, who can't find the intricacies within a script -if you can't do these things, then you simply can't *be* an actor with any conviction. It certainly suits directors to think that actors can't think for themselves - not least because that makes *their* decisions appear to be less contestable. But it will depend on the director - some like nothing better than doing the minimum of work, and asking the actors to provide all the input!
It might be interesting, in this respect, to survey what actors did *before* they became actors - you may well find a lot of the younger ones have, in effect, followed no path other than putting themselves through school and then heading to drama school at the age of 18, but many who do not come to acting in the first instance have all sorts of serious career paths for years before they turn professional - an interesting study in itself. I know actors who were, once upon a time, headmasters, professional sportsmen and women, journalists, GP's and surgeons, city analysts and stockbrokers, ex-Marines and Intelligence officers, who have been jailed, who worked in the sex trade, who were high-ranking fashion photographers or rock musicians, just to name a few, before they became actors for one reason or another. It all makes for varied, and fascinating, performance. It is possibly true that, since the disintegration of a 'progressive' career path for many actors (i.e. from amateur enthusiams through to study at drama school to working in rep to becoming known in the national industry), the likelihood of actors emerging from all walks of life, as opposed to being 'career' actors for the whole of their working life, has increased. But it has always been the case that many actors come to acting from all sorts of backgrounds - and I tend to be talking about not those who are 'jumping on the bandwagon', but those who have put aside an earlier existence, signed on at a drama school, won their Equity card, and are now trading as actors. Certainly, actors aren't books that can be judged by their covers.
