Worst Actor Names (1 Viewer)

[Josh Campbell]

is there a site that has actors screen name versus their real names? I find it fascinating for some reason.

 

[Dan Rudolph]

IMDB has most actor's birth names.

 

[Ben Silva]

Jane Seymour is another star who took an already famous name to replace her real moniker: Joyce Penelope Wilhemina Frankenberger.

 

[Yee-Ming]

Ugh. I have NEVER heard him called that; curious, since amongst English-speaking Chinese in South-East Asia, Hong Kong actors are well-known by their Western names as well. Chow is the one star I had never heard a Western name attached to.

 

[Scott Leopold]

While I can't think of any other actors that haven't been mentioned, when I was a kid we had a next door neighbor named Bambi. His mother picked that name because she saw the Disney movie when she was pregnant with him. He was a former marine, big as a house, and not someone you'd ever even think about kidding about his name.

 

[Lars Larsen]

I think River Phoenix is a strange name. I thought it was the title of a movie, when I first heard it. Or what about Minnie Driver. Welcome to fantasy land... :rolleyes
Another one is Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, maybe not a bad name but you best set time aside in your time schedule if you plan to utter that name verbaly.

 

[Stevan Lay]

Skeet Ulrich - who's real name is Bryan.

 

[paul-faofnight]

how about
red buttons, man that can't be his real name.
orson welles, even the great mans name is strange.
scatman crothers, thats a great name tho.
altho not an actor(i dont think) mary fukato, her name always stuck out in the closing credits of cheers, (i think)

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

Now that is a funny story.

 

[Brian Thibodeau]

The only place I've ever seen it was on the English credits on the packaging for the Universe DVD of SEVENTH CURSE (or, if I'm wrong on that one, it might have been SCARED STIFF). I couldn't imagine any reason why they'd stick it there unless he was flirting with the name at the time and somehow it had to be included in the translated credits for that film. I've never seen it anywhere else, thankfully, so I've always assumed Chow saw no need to cater to the English-speaking crowd until he actually came to America and got saddled with inferior pictures.

 

[Ian_H]

That would be Carol Christine Hilaria Pounder. I can see the reasoning behind using CCH.

--Ian

 

[Yee-Ming]

Don't see anything wrong with Carol Pounder. Or Carol C. Pounder, if there's another Carol Pounder already in SAG.

As the years roll on, and SAG gets more and more members, past and present, aren't we going to see a proliferation of actors/actresses "forced" to use full names (i.e. first + middle + surname), or at least add middle initials?

 

[Jason Seaver]

Well, there'll be others falling off the back end. Harrison Ford was credited as Harrison J. Ford in a couple early appearances, until he actually managed to locate a death certificate for a "Harrison Ford" who had acted in silents.

But it's got to be done; one's name is a commodity; I gather the two Vanessa Williamses have had run-ins where a casting director thought he was dealing with one rather than the other (which is why the more well-known one is now credited as "Vanessa L. Williams").

 

[Brian Thibodeau]

We can be so collectively ignorant in the west when we want to be! I'd confess to being one of the ones who assumed her family name was Wong since the U.S. system has an annoying habit of flip-flopping the names of Asian actors who don't adopt English names, thus putting the family name last for consistency in the credits. Funny in the case of Shanghai Knights, they at least put it in the proper order and still manage to confuse people. Even trickier when someone - the actress? her agent? the studio? - decides to needlessly simplify an Asian actor's name. This is where I give Chow yun-fat credit when he went Hollywood and kept the dignity of his given name.

Interestingly, I've seen many Caucasian "actors" in Asian films billed with four- or five-character Chinese names and have often wondered what the translation means in Chinese. In the case of many of the forgettable, regrettable Caucasian martial artists who pop up in Hong Kong movies, I suspect the names must translate into things like "White Ghost No Talent" or "Big Nose Ham and Cheese" or "Cardboard Gwei Lo Villain Player."

Ngom hai gwai! Ngo hai yan!


EDIT: I once saw Lin Ching-hsia billed as VENUS Lin in some older Taiwanese bubblegum programmer, probably from the 70's. Apt, really.

 

[hanson mat]

Calista Flockhart

Sounds like a disease that a bird would have.

 

[chris winters]

hanson mat is a pretty cool screen name

 

[Lynda-Marie]

I worked at an answering service for 6 1/2 years, and we had a lot of unusual and sometimes downright weird names come at us. I suspect a lot of it was ignorance of "foreign" names or foreign sounding names.

I got a chuckle recently when I saw a bumper sticker that read: "If Jesus was a Jew, then why does he have a Mexican name?"

Once in a while, we'd get calls from Hispanic men named "Jesus", which of course, is pronounced "Hey soos". In a room full of operators, who could sometimes get a little punch drunk, it was a day brightener and gave us a little laugh, that the Savior [depending on your religious inclinations, of course!] had given us a call and left his phone number.

I am not sure if performers should change their names or not. I don't think Marilyn Monroe would have been any less memorable as Norma Jean Baker.

Yee Ming, I am with you about Asian [or for that matter any other nationality] performers changing their names - it's foolish on the surface.

HOWEVER, the performers may CHOOSE to do so, because they or the studios for whom they work realize that a big source of income is the US where we have [depending on another country's opinion] either a poor education system in regards to foreign languages and cultures, or folks who are too lazy to figure out how to properly pronounce a "different" name. Or, it may be that the performer had no say in what new name s/he was "given" and tries to go with the flow gracefully.

 

[Yee-Ming]

To be fair, in this instance it has nothing to do with the US studio or anyone else involved in Shanghai Knights -- I think she herself did this many years ago, though I haven't the faintest idea why. She was a model first, when she was just 16 or 17, and at that time went by her real name, but some years later became an actress -- common, that, the "Queen of Caldecott Hill" (CH being the local station's premises), one Zoe Tay, was also a top model-turned-actress. It was either at the "height" of her modelling career, or just when she switched to acting, that the moniker "Fann Wong" appeared. So no flip-flopping by US studio involved here, she did it herself.

I am always amused when reading Empire, an excellent UK movie mag, about how inconsistent they are in referring to the likes of Zhang Ziyi and aforementioned Chow Yun-fat. I suspect they simply don't know what to do with the names, so they try not to make it obvious that they aren't sure which is name and which is surname. An easy tip: surnames are, with only two exceptions (that I know of, and no artiste I know of has either), single-syllable. Hyphens are inserted into given names to show the name is two-syllables.

Following from this, "Chinese names" given to Western actors in Chinese movies are simply transliterations, and not translations. For instance, McDonald's (the burgers" are "Mai dang lao" in Chinese, sounding somewhat similar to the original, yet being fairly meaningless as a whole. Of course, some care needs to be taken that the characters are indeed meaningless as a whole, and individual characters selected (for their sound) themselves do not carry negative connotations (there's a story on Snopes about Coca Cola's translation into Chinese -- the first version suggested tadpoles...)

 

[Brian Thibodeau]

Thanks for the info, Yee-Ming (whose family name we might never know! ) . I used to read Empire on a regular basis until I stopped about six or seven years ago, around the time DVD came along and most of the things I needed to know about my favourite movies were often contained in the special features on the discs. Nonetheless, even then, I remember a couple of times where, in the body of a review of a Hong Kong picture, Empire would list the actor's given name as though it were his family name, surnames of actors being common parenthetical inclusions after the character name in a review. It used to bother me that they couldn't undertake the most basic research to discover what part of the name was the actor's FAMILY name. Thus, a Harrison Ford or a Sylvester Stallone would get "(Ford)" or "(Stallone)" while a Chow Yun-fat would get a "(Yun-fat)." Very lazy mistakes, yet still far too common even today for my liking.

Sadly, the Leaonard Maltin video guides are guilty of this on at least one Chow movie, the name of which escapes me. I believe it may be one of his American films, as I vaguely recall an American co-star getting identified in the body of the review by his last name, while Chow was called "Yun-fat."

I used to write reviews for a local daily newspaper here and the dork who replaced me (he lasted three weekend columns before they replaced his sorry writing with canned reviews from Canadian Press; I lasted seven years!), a guy I'd introduced to Hong Kong movies, did this in two of his three video columns on jaw-droppingly misinformed reviews of old HK films. He was trying to sound like he was worldly when it came to cinema, but in fact he was just fortunate enough to inherit all the contacts and freebies I had built up over the years. Thank god the internet - and its far more knowledgable and thoughtful scribes - has made most if not ALL small-time print reviewers redundant.

 

[Yee-Ming]

It's Lim (transliterated from Hokkien). In Mandarin it would be "Lin" -- it is the same as Lin Ching-hsia's surname.