Actors

The teen-age girls dance for the devil in the forest, run naked in the moonlight and think they can fly under a spell. Given the company they're keeping, you may believe it, too. Professional actors are collaborating with 15 seniors from the city's School for the Arts in a production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," due to open Nov. 17 at the midtown Everyman Theatre. The high-schoolers are learning from pros how to make it look believable when they travel back to Salem, Mass., circa 1692, a time when a whole town talked of witchcraft.

The story, like an old VHS tape, has undoubtedly been distorted by years of repeated use, but here goes: It's 1975. Dustin Hoffman is on the set of John Schlesinger's Marathon Man, running wind sprints to prepare for a scene that calls for his character to appear flushed and out of breath. Seeing his young co-star jog up and down the street for no apparent reason, Laurence Olivier - the wizened Pharaoh of British theater - haughtily asks Hoffman to explain himself. When Hoffman obliges, Olivier shakes his head and clucks, "Why don't you try acting, my boy?"

J. Allen Suddeth spends much of his professional life sitting in the dark, waiting. He imagines in the darkness how best to stab a person through the heart with a knife. Or how a man looks when he is tossed down two flights of stairs. Or what it sounds like when someone gets bashed over the head with a pool cue.But he is not waiting for a payoff or for an assassin's signal. He is waiting for his cue.He is one of a handful of people nationally known as fight masters. In the world of theater, filled with make-believe and fraught with emotion, Mr. Suddeth choreographs some of the most dramatic moments of all: battle scenes, barroom brawls, pratfalls, any athletic endeavors undertaken by the actors.

Heath Ledger, the Australian actor who earned an Academy Award nomination for his turn as a stubbornly taciturn gay ranch hand in Brokeback Mountain, was found dead yesterday in a Manhattan apartment, New York police said. He was 28. A housekeeper sent to fetch Mr. Ledger for a massage appointment found him naked and unresponsive about 3:30 p.m., NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. Police sources told The New York Times yesterday that sleeping pills were found near Mr. Ledger's body, leading them to suspect suicide or an accidental overdose as the cause of death.

Edgar A. Poe, local author and poet of much renown, was laid to rest at Westminster Hall yesterday inside a simple redwood coffin, after a grand theatrical and oratorical send-off to usher him, as he once wrote, "into the region of shadows." Of course the true Poe remained buried beneath the monument on the northwest corner of the church grounds in Southwest Baltimore, near where his body was placed hastily in a family plot soon after his death on Oct. 7, 1849. But yesterday the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe's death was revived, so that the great poet could receive the eulogy that eluded him in the days following his demise.

Four-year-old Brittany Slattery packed everything a pirate-hunter would need in her red bag for the trip to the Inner Harbor: a compass, a (toy) pistol, a treasure of loose change, a sword, a video of Disney's "Treasure Island" and a bottle of rum (water, really).It did the trick. Brittany found gun-wielding, sword-flashing, rum-toting pirates at the Inner Harbor yesterday, but she couldn't muster up the courage to have her picture taken with a group of actors portraying the swashbucklers.

Gerald Riley and Karen Lambert are out of breath even before they begin acting.Dressed like roadies, they haul props and furniture from a cramped red Nissan into an echoing multipurpose room, then fiddle with microphones and speakers for the next half-hour. Just minutes before show time, they dart out of sight, returning momentarily in intricate 1940s garb.As they are introduced as "The Bickersons," the latest play by the Wheatfield Theatre Company, Riley rushes to drink a glass of water and Lambert takes a deep breath.

Hugh Laurie wields a mean electric guitar, has one of prime time's best scowls and plays an American doctor with enough artistry to have picked up a pair of Emmy nominations, a couple of Golden Globes and a Screen Actors Guild Award. It wasn't so long ago that someone like the Oxford-born, Cambridge-educated Laurie, if he appeared on a series like Fox's House at all, would play, well, an Englishman. Perhaps not the supremely silly upper-class twit he embodied so memorably in Jeeves & Wooster, the vintage British series, but at least some sort of Brit.

Dustin Hoffman has been a major movie star for more than three decades, one of those rare actors whose careers can be judged as both a commercial and artistic success.Yet there Hoffman was in the New York Times last week, a quivering bundle of insecurities, confiding that he has always felt like a "fluke" who never believed he had really "arrived," and concluding that "in a way I've been hanging on by my fingertips for the whole ride."Huh? Clearly, there is stuff going on inside an actor's psyche the rest of us can only guess at.Caroline Nesbitt, a stage actress now on tour with "Enchanted Doll," a production of the Underground Railway Theatre of Boston, clears up some of the mystery in the current issue of American Theatre magazine.

They're a television producer's dream and a casting agent's easiest call: actors who come with an audience built right in. They're people like James Garner and Carol Burnett, Andy Griffith and Carroll O'Connor, Ted Danson and Bill Cosby, Rosie O'Donnell and Oprah Winfrey. And, of course, Michael J. Fox. Let's admit this up front: "Spin City" has never been a hit -- it ranks 37th among current TV programs, down from 29th last season -- and it's not among the brightest lights of the sitcom world.