Like the majority of actors who don’t walk straight out of Drama School in to a soap (and very few do even if the supply does seem to be interminable) I have found myself doing many other things outside of the arts to pay the bills. The honest truth is that most actors are jacks of all trades. They have to be. I’d say that only two thirds of my life’s income has actually come from performing. The rest of the time I’ve lived the cliché of being a barman, waiter, labourer, clerk, customer services assistant in a bookshop, drama teacher  and writer to name but a few.

Only the very lucky have uninterrupted careers. Even the actors you see on television or in the theatre are not working all the time. A very good friend of mine who had a major part in a soap a few years back, when he left it found himself working in a call centre. He is now, happily, a continuity announcer; it’s his voice you’ll hear linking television programmes on some satellite channel or other.

I was very lucky in that I fell in with an extremely successful theatre company a couple of years after leaving university. It specialised in small to mid scale touring theatre, visiting arts centres and larger venues all over the UK and the rest of the world. I worked with them on and off for fifteen years. With so many cuts in the arts and theatre companies being forced to close down, that may not be quite such a possibility today. But if you are good, if you are professional about your work you will gain respect and then the chances of continuing offers is increased.

In my role as a drama teacher, when I ask students what they want to be when they leave school, the most dispiriting answer is that a lot of them ‘want to be a celebrity’. When asked how they would achieve this they occasionally say ‘by being an actor’. If you want celebrity, you can achieve this through being an actor but frankly good actors just want to be actors. Celebrity status comes as a by-product and should never be sought for its own sake.

If you want to be an actor, not a celebrity, an actor then there are things you can do to give you the best chance of making a living at it:

• Practice. Act. Act in everything you can. Join a drama group if one is available to you. Read plays. Get involved.
• Consider drama school. They have access to agents and casting agents that can help you when you leave.
• If you don’t get in to drama school, it’s not the end. Many great actors have had a successful career without having been formally trained and many who have had training find it just as difficult to find work.
• Be prepared to be poor every now and then.
• Remember that acting isn’t just telly and films. It’s theatre, radio, voice over, advertising, modelling, corporate training and role play, street theatre, circus, the list goes on. I’ve been involved in most of these facets of acting at some point.

Variety is the secret of earning a living being an actor. It’s so much more exciting and interesting than working in an office.