Actors

Within a half-hour of her arrival on the TV set, Kerri O'Dair was transformed from casually clad college student to the picture of a young lawyer, dressed in pearls, a black suit and high heels. While a stylist applied makeup, the 18-year-old studied her notes and prepared for her appearance on "School Court TV. " O'Dair, a student at the Community College of Baltimore County's Dundalk campus, plays the prosecutor in the latest episode of the courtroom drama, which airs this weekend on cable television at Comcast 45.2 or Fios 45.6.

Baltimore actor Charles S. Dutton said the murder of John Wood, a retired city sanitation worker who was the inspiration behind the character Dutton played on the 1990s show “Roc,” was difficult to digest. “I wasn't expecting ever in a lifetime that John would go out that way,” Dutton told the Sun on Thursday. Wood, 80, was killed Monday after police said he was in argument that resulted with him taking a punch that caused Wood to fall back and hit his head on a concrete step, which killed him. Police on Wednesday charged Lorenzo Thornton, 25, with second-degree murder.

When Manchester Volunteer Fire Company puts on its annual spring comedy, the laughs that the play elicits are as much from the actors as from the characters they portray and the script.A seemingly natural group of clowns, these firefighters and their friends make themselves laugh so much that it is sometimes a wonder they get through the production.For instance, at Tuesday's rehearsal, Janet Bangert, playing the lead role in "The Eager Miss Beaver," had the cast laughing so hard at her exaggerated country "hick" drawl that practice momentarily halted.

The 80-year-old man killed in Northeast Baltimore on Monday - after a punch caused him to fall and hit his head, police said - was the inspiration for the 1990s TV show "Roc. " John Wood formed the basis for the lead character on the Fox show portrayed by Baltimore actor Charles S. Dutton. Dutton grew up in Wood's neighborhood, and in the show portrayed a trash worker who believed in an honest day's work and went beyond his means to help his neighbors. Wood retired as a Baltimore sanitation worker after more than 35 years, his wife said.

The big revelation of "The Big Kahuna" is that we're all salesmen, whether we're selling our products or ourselves. Forgive me for being underwhelmed. Unimaginatively directed and too stagebound for the big screen, "The Big Kahuna" features Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito as industrial-lubricant salesmen determined to land a big client. They'd also like to break in their new partner, who has the peculiar notion there are more important things in life than the hard sell. Spacey is Larry, a smooth talker who, when he's not pitching a product, is being brutally honest with anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot.

Broadway producers and actors reached a tentative agreement on a four-year contract yesterday, narrowly averting what would have been the second strike in less than 18 months. "The contract will serve our industry and theatergoers well, keeping Broadway strong in New York and creating more opportunities on the road," said a joint statement released by the Actors' Equity Association and the League of American Theatres and Producers. Details of the tentative agreement were not immediately available.

HOLLYWOOD -- Heightening fears of an actors' strike this summer, one of Hollywood's two major performers unions voted Saturday to break off its 27-year joint bargaining relationship with the Screen Actors Guild, leaving each to negotiate separate new contracts with the major studios. The 11th-hour move by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists is the latest thunderclap in Hollywood's winter of discontent, which has seen the television industry upended by a 100-day strike by screenwriters.

HOLLYWOOD -- Like any unknown actor looking for his big break, Khalid Abdalla was eager to be cast in a movie, especially a studio production. Yet when the 25-year-old performer heard about a possible lead part in a forthcoming Universal Studios film, Abdalla considered turning it down. The hesitation was understandable: The acting job was playing Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker at the controls of the Sept. 11 jetliner that crashed into a Pennsylvania field, killing all 40 passengers and crew on board, in United 93. As filmmakers tell a number of stories about Sept.

Whether Bill Largess is teaching grown-ups or kids, he finds that the basic misconception about acting is the same. "They think it's learning the lines and getting up on a stage and saying them with everybody looking at you," Largess says. Playing a character who really wants something - someone who is strongly "motivated," to use the actors' term - "is really a new idea for a lot of them." That is one of the fundamentals taught by Largess, Bruce Nelson and Peggy Yates at Rep Stage's Actors' Summer Institute at Howard Community College, where Shakespeare is the theme this summer.

The drug dealers at the town meeting yesterday shooting at each other while a 7-year-old boy was caught in the middle of the fracas were actors -- their weapons cap guns. But the audience members knew the act well."This is very, very close to what is real," said Baltimore Police Maj. Ronald Collins after actors from Morgan State University played out a scene in which one dealer brags that he doesn't need to go to college because he makes plenty of money selling drugs.The Monumental City Bar Association, a group of 400 black attorneys, sponsored the town meeting at Calvary Baptist Church at 3911 Garrison Blvd.

The final stage direction in Samuel Beckett's “Play” is “repeat.” The Acme Corporation, one of Baltimore's experimental theater companies, is taking that instruction very seriously. Last Friday, the one-act, three-character, roughly one-hour work was performed on a kind of continual loop from noon until midnight in a high-ceilinged, balconied hall at St. Mark's Lutheran Church. But that's just a warm-up. This week, the production's length will double, running continually from one noon to the next.

There has been a change in the lineup for the second production in Everyman Theatre's new home -- Yasmina Reza's bitingly funny "God of Carnage. " Due to a shoulder injury, resident company member Bruce Randolph Nelson had to bow out. The role of Alan Raleigh, half of one of the two tense couples at the heart of the play, will now be performed by Tim Getman. (Nelson is expected to be back onstage as scheduled for Everyman's season finale, George Farquhar 's "The Beaux' Stratagem.

Being snubbed might have been the best thing to happen to Ben Affleck. His film “Argo” took the best picture Oscar on Sunday night at the 85 th Academy Awards - more than a little solace, perhaps, for being snubbed in the directing category. Other marquee winners were Daniel Day-Lewis for lead actor for “Lincoln,” Jennifer Lawrence for lead actress for “Silver Linings Playbook,” and Ang Lee for director for “Life of Pi,” which won four Oscars, the most for any film.

Jacoby Jones will get an even wider repertoire of moves, Kristin Stewart has recapped the role of the clumsy mumbler, and tweeps dislike Seth MacFarlane. Welcome to your post-weekend online trends report for Feb 25. Ravens wide receiver Jones will be a contestant on 'Dancing With the Stars,' ABC has announced. That came during the commercial break from another big traffic recipient: The Oscar presentations last night drove almost every remaining popular search over the weekend, including Stewart, who presented with Daniel Radcliffe despite a lower body injury.

Christoph Waltz, fresh off winning one of the most competetive Oscar categories in recent memory -- all five Supporting Actor nominees were previous Oscar winners -- was admittedly caught off guard when he heard his name called from the Oscar stage. Asked how he felt about winning his second Supprting Actor Oscar in three years, Waltz said simply, "Guess. " Then, he paid tribute to the competition. "I was on a list with the greatest actors around," he said backstage. "How do you think someone feels when his name is called in that context?"

Well now, that was a surprise. Waltz's win, over favored Tommy Lee Jones, surprised just about everyone -- and suggets two things: For one, it doesn't bode well for "Lincoln's" chances. And two, maybe Jones should have smiled more at those earlier awards ceremonies.

NEW YORK -- If the charges against James Powers are true, he must be quite an actor because most of the people he is said to have fooled are actors. Over several years he won their confidence, became their friend, took over their financial affairs and, prosecutors say, took their money.He is charged with stealing more than $50,000 from an actress on "L.A. Law" and more than $150,000 from a star of "The Guiding Light." In perhaps the greatest testament to his skill at illusion, he is accused of successfully impersonating actress Jane Alexander over the telephone while bilking her and her husband of more than $1 million.

It's the age-old question: Genetics or environment?Are certain actors by some defect of birth destined to appear in ungodly strings of awful films, or do they plummet to the depths of career degradation once they find themselves firmly entrenched in Hollywood?It's a pertinent question, as this summer is shaping up as one of the worst, aesthetically speaking, in recent memory. Films have opened big, but audiences all but disappear after a couple of weekends.Way too many actors seem to be making careers out of churning out assembly-line-processed, sorry movies.

The HCC Actors Guild will perform "The Pillowman" Feb. 22 and 23 and March 1 and 2 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 24 and March 3 at 3 p.m. at Harford Community College, Joppa Hall, Black Box Theatre. This dark comedy by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh tells the tale of Katurian, a fiction writer living in a police state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town. The play received two Tony Awards and the 2004 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Master playwright Ken Ludwig set the play "Moon Over Buffalo" in 1953, a time when struggling veteran actors George and Charlotte Hay are alternately performing "Cyrano de Bergerac" and Noel Coward's "Private Lives" at Buffalo's shabby Erlanger Theatre. The decidedly un-shabby Bowie Playhouse is the current home for Prince George's Little Theatre's bright production of "Moon Over Buffalo," running through Feb. 16. In this work, Ludwig creates sturdy plots featuring mistaken identities and frantic characters who run into and away from one another's complaints, slamming doors as they go. The plot centers on George and Charlotte, former theater headliners who are now broke in Buffalo, with unpaid actors leaving their troupe.