Mr. Kovida's group received financial help from three well-known Burmese dissidents — an actor, a comedian and a poet — but it did not receive foreign aid during the protests, he said.
LOS ANGELES — A victory by a dissident group of actors in the closely watched election by the Screen Actors Guild injected new turmoil into the labor union's internal divisions this week, but had no immediate impact on the long-stalled contract negotiations with the major Hollywood studios.
Among Ahmed's comrades is Khalid Abdalla, the son of an exiled Egyptian dissident and an actor who has appeared in movies like "The Kite Runner" and "United 93".
The presentation – which gives advice on dealing with bomb threats, screening mail and hostile reconnaissance – covers the threat posed and methodologies used by Isis, al-Qaida, so-called lone actors and dissident Irish Republicans.
"At this stage, fame may be more of a danger than a protection because the regime does not want any prominent figure to come to the fore and provide a public face for the revolution," said Ammar Abdulhamid, a US-based dissident and son of Syrian actor Mona Wasif.
He put Khodorkovsky behind bars for the same reason that he abolished elections or had Litvinenko killed: in his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersize model of the KGB, there can be no room for dissidents or even for independent actors.
As the rock-loving Czech dissident in the Stoppard play, the British actor Rufus Sewell seems to exist in a state of eternal bafflement, squinting warily at the sentences lobbed at him by academics, politicians and journalists.
The two men have something in common in that they both achieved high office after long careers outside government, Mandela as a political dissident, Schwarzenegger as a bodybuilder and movie actor.
In Wenceslas Square, the scene in 1989 of student demonstrations that ended with the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel being installed as president, belligerent policemen were yesterday played by actors.
But to find, as I say, exactly the right actor for that bizarre part of the one-legged Vietnamese monomaniacal dissident is richly satisfying.
