In this paper, we define the concept of digital actors and show their importance in the future interactive digital television and multimedia. We discuss the applications of these digital actors in the new multimedia services especially for training and education. We summarize the main techniques to create and control these digital actors and emphasize the importance to develop new tools for the control and the autonomy of these actors. An integrated and functional system for the animation of digital actors is presented. In particular, we describe the integration of motion control techniques, autonomy based on synthetic sensors and facial communication