You won’t believe what these Hollywood celebrities’ birth names are

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Today, November 10, it is exactly a century since Richard Walter Jenkins, Jr., was born in Pontrhydyfen, a village in southern Wales. If that name does not ring a bell, that’s not surprising. You’re likelier to recognize the identity Jenkins adopted nearly two decades after his birth: in 1943, he became Richard Burton.

Why did Richard Burton change his name?

Then 18, Burton took the surname of Philip Burton, a school teacher who saw the future screen star’s potential, playing a pivotal role in kindling his four-decade acting career. Such was Philip’s influence on the young Burton’s life, indeed, that he became the teenaged Oscar-nominee-to-be’s legal guardian.

Best know for films such as Cleopatra, Where Eagles Dare, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Burton has said of Philip: “I owe him everything.”

Burton, who died at the age of 58 in 1984, is not the only British acting great to achieve stardom under a name you won’t find on their birth certificate.

From Micklewhite and Dwight to the bright lights

Michael Caine, a two-time Academy Award winner who boasts well over 100 movie credits, was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.

Before making his film debut back in the mid-1950s, Caine opted to switch Maurice for Michael – then settled on a stage surname when he saw the title of the 1954 Edward Dmytryk movie The Caine Mutiny, a World War II picture starring Humphrey Bogart.

In his autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, Caine later recalled that the name reflected his feelings of being a show-business outsider at the time. “Like Cain in the Old Testament, I, too, was outside Paradise,” he said, per Far Out magazine.

Meanwhile, a fellow Oscar winner and knighthood recipient, the music legend Sir Elton John, is also a notable bearer of a rather less catchy birth name. John, one of just 21 entertainers to achieve ‘EGOT’ status as the winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony, was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight.

John has explained that his choice of stage name was inspired by two musicians he admired. In a 1990 interview, he recalled (via The Wrap): “I was in [the 1960s Blues group] Bluesology, and we were coming back from a Long John Baldry gig somewhere, and we got a bus from London airport to London and someone said, ‘We’ve made it now, so what are you going to call yourself?’

“The saxophone player in the band was called Elton Dean, a very good jazz sax player, and the only other Elton I could think of was Elton Hayes, who recorded the song ‘The Owl and the Pussycat.’ So I took ‘Elton’ from Elton Dean and ‘John’ from Long John Baldry. I wanted to choose a name that nobody had, and it was as quick as that.”

Other prominent name-changers

Alongside Burton, Caine and John, there are scores of other showbiz favorites who were born under a name you may be less familiar with. Major examples include: