Actors: Always Richer Than Poets
In honor of last night's Academy Awards ceremony, Harper's digs deep into its archive for this article from February 1851, the same year as the first Oscar broadcast. (Clint Eastwood won that year, too.) Apparently actors were always overpaid. They were also always mocked by envious journalists (who were probably writing screenplays—or whatever the hell people wrote back in the day to make millions quickly):
There are many instances of great painters, poets, and sculptors (ay, and philosophers, too), who could scarcely gain a livelihood; but we should be puzzled to name a great actor without an enormous salary. An income of three or four thousand per annum, argent comptant, carries along with it many solid enjoyments. The actor who can command this, by laboring in his vocation, and whose ears are continually tingling with the nightly applause of his admirers, has no reason to consider his lot a hard one, because posterity may assign to him in the Temple of Fame a less prominent niche than is occupied by Milton, who, when alive, sold Paradise Lost for fifteen pounds, or by Rembrandt, who was obliged to feign his own death before his pictures would provide him a dinner.
Sort of puts Hilary Swank's "just a girl from a trailer park" thing in perspective, no?