The jaunty lyrics of the Disney song notwithstanding, the actor’s life is very rarely a “Hi-diddle-dee-dee!” existence. And it’s certainly not the life for everyone.

The usual trajectory of an actor’s career is marked by vertiginous ups and downs.

There are small parts in big productions, major roles in critically heralded but commercially unsuccessful ventures and rejection is an everyday occupational hazard based more on the intangibles of a casting director’s whims than competence or artistic integrity.

Talent not only goes unrewarded on a daily basis in the acting field, frequently it goes unrecognised. Success is too often dependent on happy accidents rather than ability or effort.

Far more so than in most professions, persistence, cast-iron discipline and developing a skin as thick as rhinoceros hide are the necessary prerequisites for a long career in acting.

Last week Bermudian Daren Herbert was honoured at the Toronto Theatre Critics Awards as Best Actor In A Musical for his role in a recent Canadian production of The Wild Party, a darkly sardonic meditation on Jazz Age affluence and excess.

The award, voted on by some of Canada’s leading theatrical writers, provided some welcome international recognition for this bravura local talent.

Based in Canada in recent years, he has amassed a formidable list of TV, movie and theatrical credits (including a stand-out turn in the Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the musical Dreamgirls).

And, as last week’s Toronto award demonstrated, Mr Herbert is also developing an increasingly formidable professional reputation in his hugely competitive field.

While awards do not pay the mortgage, they add — as Mr Herbert said — a certain cachet to an actor’s standing.

They enhance reputations, help to generate interest and offers in the industry and bring actors to the attention of a wider, more general audiences than their work alone reaches.

Mr Herbert is one of a number of young Bermudians who are currently demonstrating their acting chops to appreciative international audiences.

Nick Christopher, following an arresting and widely acclaimed performance in a New York revival of Rent, has been appearing on the Great White Way in Motown: The Musical and will open in a new Off-Broadway drama in August. Rebecca Faulkenberry played the title character’s love interest in Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark after an earlier Broadway role in the jukebox musical Rock Of Ages.

And young Candace Furbert has been barnstorming the UK non-stop in recent years in productions of The Lion King and Shrek: The Musical.

There are any number of other young Bermudians in the creative and performing arts who are achieving prominence and distinction in their chosen fields.

This number includes Kenneth Amis —a virtuoso tuba player with the Empire Brass who has held the International Brass Chair at London’s Royal School of Music and currently serves on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fully developed, gold-plated creative talent is not, almost by definition, common in any community. In tiny enclaves like Bermuda it has always been as scarce as it was generally underappreciated.

But the current generation of Bermudians are blessed with a disproportionately large share of ability and self-discipline and they are continuing to demonstrate they can not only hold their own on a world stage but excel.

The diversity and vitality of their talents is hugely impressive. Their achievements are commendable.

And it’s gratifying that many of the creative Bermudians based abroad are happy to serve as de facto cultural ambassadors for the Island (Ms Faulkenberry seemed to spend as much time promoting Bermuda tourism as she did on stage during the Spider-Man run).

Too often in the past, we have thought of the artist as an idler or dilettante, John F Kennedy mused in 1960.

“We have done (them) an injustice,” he said.

“The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has laboured hard, often amid deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening.

“His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline.

“To further the appreciation of culture among all the people, to increase respect for the creative individual, to widen participation by all — this is one of the fascinating challenges of these days.”

More than 50 years on broadening the reach of the arts and encouraging appreciation for individual artists remains no less of a challenge for all communities, great and small.

But the current flowering of creativity among young Bermudians — and the growing popular and critical respect these actors, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and other artists are attracting both here and elsewhere — would suggest the situation is actually becoming less challenging by the day.