Character actor

A character actor is a supporting actor skilled at playing distinctly unusual, interesting, or eccentric characters, such that they are "almost unrecognizable from part to part, and yet play many, many roles convincingly and memorably." The term, often contrasted with that of leading actor, is somewhat abstract and open to interpretation: in a general sense, all actors can be considered as character actors since they all play "characters", but the usual sense is an actor who plays a distinctive and important supporting role. Sometimes it describes an actor who plays characters who are very different from themselves, while in another sense it describes an actor who specializes in minor roles. In either case, character actor roles are more substantial than bit parts or non-speaking extras. The term is used primarily to describe television and film actors, and is less used to describe theater actors. An early use of the term was in the 1883 edition of The Stage, which defined a character actor as "one who portrays individualities and eccentricities."

Role

A role (also rôle or social role) is a set of connected behaviours, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behaviour and may have a given individual social status or social position. It is vital to both functionalist and interactionist understandings of society. Social role posits the following about social behaviour:

Trait (computer programming)

In computer programming, a trait is a concept used in object-oriented programming, which represents a set of methods that can be used to extend the functionality of a class.

Characteristics

Traits both provide a set of methods that implement behaviour to a class and require that the class implement a set of methods that parameterize the provided behaviour.

For inter-object communication and sharing, traits are somewhat between an object-oriented protocol (interface) and a mixin. An interface may define one or more behaviors via method signatures, while a trait defines behaviors via full method definitions: i.e., it includes the body of the methods. In contrast, mixins include full method definitions and may also carry state through member variable, while traits usually don't.

Hence an object defined as a trait is created as the composition of methods, which can be used by other classes without requiring multiple inheritance. In case of a naming collision, when more than one trait to be used by a class has a method with the same name, the programmer must explicitly disambiguate which one of those methods will be used in the class; thus manually solving the diamond problem of multiple inheritance. This is different from other composition methods in object-oriented programming, where conflicting names are automatically resolved by scoping rules.

Character (arts)

A character (or fictional character) is a person in a narrative work of art (such as a novel, play, television series or film). Derived from the ancient Greek word χαρακτήρ, the English word dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of "a part played by an actor" developed. Character, particularly when enacted by an actor in the theatre or cinema, involves "the illusion of being a human person." In literature, characters guide readers through their stories, helping them to understand plots and ponder themes. Since the end of the 18th century, the phrase "in character" has been used to describe an effective impersonation by an actor. Since the 19th century, the art of creating characters, as practiced by actors or writers, has been called characterisation.

A character who stands as a representative of a particular class or group of people is known as a type. Types include both stock characters and those that are more fully individualised. The characters in Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) and August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888), for example, are representative of specific positions in the social relations of class and gender, such that the conflicts between the characters reveal ideological conflicts.

Character

Character(s) may refer to:

Art and entertainment

Character (novel)

Character (original Dutch title Karakter) is a novel by Dutch author Ferdinand Bordewijk published in 1936. Subtitled "Een roman van zoon en vader", "a novel of son and father", it is a Bildungsroman that traces the relationship between a stern father and his son. Character is Bordewijk's best-known novel, and the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.

References

Character (mathematics)

In mathematics, a character is (most commonly) a special kind of function from a group to a field (such as the complex numbers). There are at least two distinct, but overlapping meanings. Other uses of the word "character" are almost always qualified.

Multiplicative character

A multiplicative character (or linear character, or simply character) on a group G is a group homomorphism from G to the multiplicative group of a field (Artin 1966), usually the field of complex numbers. If G is any group, then the set Ch(G) of these morphisms forms an abelian group under pointwise multiplication.

This group is referred to as the character group of G. Sometimes only unitary characters are considered (thus the image is in the unit circle); other such homomorphisms are then called quasi-characters. Dirichlet characters can be seen as a special case of this definition.

Multiplicative characters are linearly independent, i.e. if are different characters on a group G then from it follows that .