The APGAS programming model is a powerful computing paradigm for multi-core and massively parallel computer architectures. It allows for the dynamic creation and distribution of thousands of threads amongst hundreds of nodes in a cluster computer within a single application. For programs of such a complexity, appropriate higher level abstractions on computation and communication are necessary for performance analysis and optimization. In this work, we present actorX10, an X10 library of a formally specified actor model based on the APGAS principles. The realized actor model explicitly exposes communication paths and decouples these from the control flow of the concurrently executed application components. Our approach provides the right abstraction for a wide range of applications. Its capabilities and advantages are introduced and demonstrated for two applications from the embedded system and HPC domain, i.e., an object detection chain and a proxy application for the simulation of tsunami events.