I use place of birth every so often, as an indicator of where to look on the web for info on an actor (an Italian database is what made me think of this).
The sorting behavior in PVD is strictly left-to-right alphabetic, and the city comes first. Sample from my database:
Genova, Italy
Gentilly, Seine [now Val-de-Marne], France
Gentofte, Denmark
Georgetown, Washington, District of Columbia, USA
Germany
It would be more beneficial if there were two fields that could be accessed separately....group by country, sort by city. District / State / Province information could remain with the city...I can't see any value in accessing these separately.