Acting Tips: Adopting a New Name

Something that used to be routine, but now seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years is the carefully considered stage/professional name.  Yes, it can feel horribly awkward answering to a name other than the one we grew up with, but equally true is that few of us have Rosalind Russell or Olivia de Havilland printed on our birth certificate. (Russell actually thanked her mother for giving her a movie star’s name.) 

Back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, actors didn’t hesitate to replace their birth names with something that was easier to pronounce, a better fit for their looks or personality, or eliminated confusion with another actor. Olivia de Havilland’s sister Joan went through several last names before coming up with “Fontaine” and sudden success. 

And success is what you’re after, so consider a new name carefully. The unwed mother of British actor Alec Guinness may have taken his last name off a bottle of stout, but whatever the truth it was often assumed throughout his life that he was a member of the rather prominent Guinness family (darn the luck!). Would Marion Morrison, Maurice Micklewhite, Doris Kappelhoff, Archie Leach, Krishna Bhanji, Alphonso d’Abruzzo, or Issur Demsky have had the same careers as John Wayne, Michael Caine, Doris Day, Cary Grant, Ben Kingsley, Alan Alda, or Kirk Douglas? Probably not. Yet I see a lot of actors these days hanging on to names that for various reasons work against them.

Here are reasons to consider a name change early in your career, some of which need no explanation:

1. You want to avoid confusion with a better-known actor or celebrity.  Actor Albert Brooks entered the world as Albert Einstein. No joke. Michael Keaton was born Michael Douglas. (I was the first Kathryn Browning on IMDb. Now there are five. It keeps the pressure on to be the one that’s “better known”.)

2. Your name is boring and/or commonly seen everywhere.  A lot of actors with the last names Smith, Johnson, White, Brown, Jones, etc. either replace it or dress it up with a standout first name.

3. Your name has an unfortunate association in English: Lipschitz, Leach, Barren, Cheeter, Slye, etc.

4. Your name is from a language or region that no longer expresses what you look like or who you are:  The world has become a melting pot.  If your great-great grandfather’s name was Wong, but you don’t look Asian you’re going to be confusing a lot of casting directors. 

5. Your name is hard to pronounce and frequently misspelled. 

6. You’ve always disliked your birth name or it never felt like a fit.

7. You want to protect your privacy and identity. You keep your personal life separate, your kids/spouse don’t live in your shadow, and you can travel and do legal business under your birth name. Also, when random strangers come up to you on the street and say, “Gosh, you look just like….” You have the option of laughing and saying, “I know! Everyone tells me that!”

8. You receive a sign! You’re considering a name change and out of the blue, you see a name in print, someone calls you by a different name, a name appears in a dream, whatever, and your head says, “That’s it!”  

For me, most of the above applied.  Confusion: I was named for a famous actress and daughter of an equally famous radio personality. Too common: Growing up there were at least a dozen girls in my high school with the same first name (often attached to a last name that made it a joke). Frequently misspelled: For some reason people almost always add an extra “n” to my first name, which makes it a pun.  Disliked my name: It never felt like a fit and the first and last names said together created an “ah-ah” sound that was hard on the ear. It was a sign: my husband and I were mulling over various actress names and my husband blurted out “Kathryn Browning!”  Why that? I asked.  “I don’t know, it just suddenly popped into my head!”  

And that last one is as good a reason as any. I would add that my husband doesn’t remember that story at all, which means it REALLY WAS a sign.