World AIDs Day is observed on December 1st. The day is dedicated to creating awareness of the AIDs pandemic, and the estimated 33 million people living with the AIDs virus. As AIDs has become a part of life, the film industry has begun incorporating characters living with the disease into movies hitting the big screen. These roles are challenging at best, but actors have embraced them. Characters facing AIDs are often difficult to portray.

After walking in those shoes, actors seem to seek out equally challenging roles. Hollywood's move in this direction has made it possible to create more in-depth films about other intense topics such as sexual abuse, mental illness, and homosexuality.

It seems impossible to discuss actors taking on the question of how to portray characters with AIDs without discussing Rent. After years of questioning how to turn the well-known stage production into a film, director Chris Columbus finally pulled it off in 2005. One of the songs, “La Vie Boheme,” encapsulates the entire key of how this production portrays its characters: “To people… living with — not dying from — disease!”

Roger (Adam Pascal), Mimi (Rosario Dawson), Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin) and Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) all portray people living with AIDs, and, though these are not the biggest names in Hollywood, they’ve taken on other complex roles since then.

Pascal’s American Primitive is due out in 2008, tackling the difficulties of a daughter’s relationship with her homosexual father.

Martin has taken on a number of television roles, but is currently working on a project focusing on the later years of Marvin Gaye’s life, titled Sexual Healing.

Dawson showed up in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, as well as winning an award at the Sundance Film Festival for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. She also teamed up with Heredia again in 2007 for Descent, a harsh examination of the effects of rape.

But just as Rent honored characters living with AIDS, Ed Harris portrayed a man succumbing to the virus. Harris was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Richard Brown, an author in The Hours. While his role was seen as supporting, it was a crucial thread tying the three storylines of the film together, and did not gloss over the pain of the bad days towards the end of his life.

Since The Hours was released in 2002, Harris has taken on equally difficult roles in A History of Violence and Gone Baby Gone, as well as roles in numerous other films.

Equally moving, but very differently portrayed was Robin Wright Penn’s role as Jenny in Forrest Gump. In the movie, Jenny lives a difficult life, only finding happiness as she is dying from AIDs. Penn followed up that bittersweet role with work she found satisfying, rather than the sure-to-be hits that many other actors seek out.

She’s known for turning down roles in Batman Forever and The Firm, while taking on Lori, the battered waitress in The Pledge, and the eminently troubled Phoebe, whose story is told in Sorry, Haters. She did take on a character in a big Hollywood production this year: Penn plays Queen Wealhtheow in Beowulf.

When Hollywood answers the call to care, many in and out of the industry reap the benefits.