It's a special calling which attracts the most brilliant and the most creative individuals. Its career opportunities can take people from Hollywood to London's West End. And yet it's one of the toughest professions known and one of the most glamorous.

"It's really tough, it's great but it's tough. We audition a lot of people who just think that it looks fun, it looks easy," says Andy Crook, associate co-ordinator of the three-year degree programme in theatre studies at Trinity College, Dublin.

This year nine young actors graduated from the university after completing the course.

"We look for people who are interested and have a passion in theatre and acting, and those who have taken care and time with their audition pieces," says Crook.

The course is for those "who are open and who want to be challenged and are up for that, and are prepared to work and to try things out. It's really important that they are prepared to work with other people. They have to be able to communicate on some level."

Peter McAllister, the course co-ordinator, explains that the main thing they aim to impart to students is "a sense of process; an approach that they can rely on and which will serve them for a long career. It's really a way of looking at the various kinds of problems that an actor might face. It's to try and look at the possibilities. It's not formulaic: we are not teaching a set of techniques."

For those second-level students or mature students who are toying with the idea of a career on the stage, he says: "They need to be fairly sure that they are serious about it. They should not view it as an easy option or that it's going to lead to fame and fortune." The course prepares actors and enables them "to make a career in the long term".

He reiterates the fact that the majority of actors are out of work. "The aim is to try to enable them to have regular employment . . . We want them to be employed and doing satisfactory work."

The students who are selected come from all over the country, Crook says. "We might take some people from outside of Ireland but they would have to be exceptional," he says. "Our main aim is to take on Irish people and those who are interested in working in Irish industry.

"In acting you have to be confident . . . we offer them the tools to find their own way of working," he says. "We give them the equipment to work in the business in terms of their voice, movement and acting ability."

Padraig Delaney (21), from Adamstown in Co Wexford, spent a year at Waterford Institute of Technology doing engineering before the call to act took a serious hold of him. He did engineering "because I thought I was expected to do it. Then when I made the decision to cop out of that (engineering course) and pursue a career in acting, friends wondered if I had my head screwed on right." It's not always seen as a stable, secure profession, he agrees. "But if you believe in yourself enough you will get there. I'd say if you just like acting, forget about it, you have to love it. A lot of the time it's an endurance test."

"I always thought I was going to end up doing something in sport but a leg injury took care of that," he says. He's currently in second year of the TCD degree programme. He would have been broken-hearted if he hadn't got a place, he says "because this was the place I felt that really paid attention to what you had to say. I had a good feeling when I came here that they listened to you."

Best of all, he says, are "the physical classes" because "different parts of movement open up different parts of your body". The course "has given me a new lease of life. I don't know what I'd be doing if I wasn't here."

ANOTHER student in his class, Amy Hastings (19), from Harold's Cross in Dublin, is equally enthusiastic and delighted to be doing the course. "I had to persuade my parents when I was little," she recalls. "It's a very movement-based course with loads of dance which I love. There's mask work and movement. It's really good and we study the physicality of characters: there's not too much intellectualising." As for experience before she started in TCD, "I had done a couple of films, I had just finished school". She had been ready to re-audition had she not been successful on her first try. Still, she says, "a lot of people get in on their second or third audition".