Who would actually name their child Meat Loaf or Queen Latifah? The parents of Marvin Aday and Dana Owens definitely didn’t.
Making it in the entertainment business takes sacrifice, and for some aspiring stars, that means abandoning the name their parents chose for them and selecting something more “American,” more debonair, or more unique. In the golden age of Hollywood, getting a new name was akin to getting a union card—a rite of passage that everyone went through. These days, though, more people choose to keep their name. Sometimes we don’t know why some performers change their name, but we do know one thing: The Wizard of Oz just wouldn’t be the same if Frances Gumm hadn’t become Judy Garland.
You Can Never Go Home Again
The most popular reason to change a name in Hollywood is to camouflage the actor’s ethnic identity. In the 1940s and ’50s, Italian- and Jewish-sounding names were mostly what got scrapped, but even today, stars with many different ethnic heritages still feel the need to sound as Americanized as possible.
Alphonso D’Abruzzo—Alan Alda
Issur Danielovitch Demsky—Kirk Douglas
Krishna Banji—Ben Kingsley
Chaim Witz—Gene Simmons
Frederick Austerlitz—Fred Astaire
Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou—George Michael
Farrokh Bulsara—Freddie Mercury
Anna Maria Luisa Italiano—Anne Bancroft
Jonathan Leibowitz—Jon Stewart
Eugene Orowitz—Michael Landon
Kalpen Modi—Kal Penn
Man Up
It can be hard for a man to pass himself off as a matinee idol when his given name is Courtney or Ashley. That’s why many male stars change their effeminate names to more masculine-sounding ones.
Marion Morrison—John Wayne
Merle Johnson, Jr.—Troy Donahue
Leslie Townes Hope—Bob Hope
Stuart Leslie Goddard—Adam Ant
Leslie Sebastian Charles—Billy Ocean
Samuel Goldfish—Samuel Goldwyn
Coy Luther Perry III—Luke Perry
