Most Actors Stink, But...

Let's face it. Most actors and actresses are pretty shallow. They are shallow in the behavior, their intellect and their political thinking. This crowd makes one nostalgic for the old studio days when actors were expected to shut up and act while the studios made the effort to make sure that the actor did not make himself look like a complete boob.
Gwyneth Paltrow makes a movie in which she plays the character of a country-western singer and all of a sudden she IS a country-western singer. Sally Fields and Meryl Streep play farmers' wives in movies and all of a sudden they are experts on farming. Alec Baldwin plays the Shadow and then IS the Shadow, and thus is an expert on politics.
Most actors, at least in their public pronouncements, are liberal. They may take that position because they are looking at the studio hands that feed them, but the writer suspects that the reason is because they do not think, They react. And because they have celebrity they think that their opinions have more weight than those who are not celebrities while, in fact, their opinions are as weightless as goose down.
One actor, and perhaps the greatest actor of our time, who is a thinker and who does not consider his opinions as a leader of the populace, is Robert Duvall. He has culturally and politically gone against the grain of Hollywood. An example would be Duvall's film The Apostle. Instead of taking cheap shots at Christian evangelists who sin and dwelling on the "hypocrisy" of the men, he portrayed man who fell and then found Grace. The same holds true for his film Tender Mercies.
Duvall is not only the best actor in the trade, but is probably the best man in the trade.
Read this for a better assessment than provided by this writer:
Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » Robert Duvall: American Through and Through