Character actor
A character actor is an actor who plays a particular kind of character in a play, movie, television program, opera or ballet. The character actor is not the main part. He is not the lover or hero. He has a character which helps to support the main characters and therefore the story.
Character roles may be roles such as: the faithful servant, the maid, the villain, the mother-in-law, the priest etc. They may or may not be comic characters.
For example, in The Wizard of Oz the main character is Dorothy. The Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Man are character roles.
Some actors or singers prefer character roles to main roles. It may be because this kind or role suits their personality or their singing voice. Some people nearly always play the same kind of character role. We say that people like that are "typecast". Some actors are happy to remain typecast. Others may wish to broaden their repertoire and take on different roles.
Character Actor Media
Actor Claude Rains (right) was sometimes a leading actor, sometimes a character actor, often cast as a sophisticated, sometimes "morally ambiguous" man.
Character actress Margaret Hamilton (left) in real life was a "sweet, gentle woman" who even taught kindergarten prior to working on Broadway and Hollywood, which was different from her on-screen persona of the Wicked Witch in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
