"Actor" and "character" don't seem to be related.

After class, I used the Oxford English Dictionary to look up the history of both words.  "Character" comes from the Greek, "kharakter," meaning, "to engrave or to mark."  "Character" came into English by way of French, and it first came into English usage in the 1300s.


"Actor" comes from a Latin root, which means "to do." It began being used to refer to those who play act in the late 1600s.  The OED sites the first instance as Sidney's Defense of Poetry.


Still, the connection between one's actions and one's character is clear, and actions and character go back at least as far as the Greeks in Western society.  In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says,

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way… you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.  

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.