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Stage names are hardly uncommon in Hollywood, but false initials are rarer — if not unheard of. To wit: Michael J. Fox’s middle name doesn’t start with “J.” The Back to the Future star’s middle name is actually Andrew, but there already was a Michael A. Fox in the Screen Actors Guild when Fox wanted to join it. So why the “J”? The letter is an homage to Michael J. Pollard, a character actor Fox admires. Pollard had more than 100 acting credits to his name by the time he died in 2019, and received Academy Award, BAFTA, and two Golden Globe nominations for his role as gas station attendant-turned-accomplice C.W. Moss in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde.
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It's a factJohn Cusack, Charlie Sheen, Ralph Macchio, and many others all auditioned for the role of Marty McFly, but Eric Stoltz was cast. It wasn’t until six weeks into production that director Robert Zemeckis let Stoltz go, feeling he wasn’t right for the part, and Fox got the role instead.
Some stage names are so successful that most people don’t realize they’re stage names. Sir Elton John was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, for instance, while Jamie Foxx’s real name is Eric Marlon Bishop, and Whoopi Goldberg’s is Caryn Elaine Johnson — to name just a few. Fox, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 and announced his condition in 1998, retired from acting in 2020. He founded the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research in 2000 and remains devoted to finding a cure for the disease.
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“Back to the Future” was almost named “______.”
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“Back to the Future” was almost named “Spaceman From Pluto.”
Middle names date back to ancient Rome.
Well, kind of. Many Romans had three names, but their second name wasn’t quite a middle name. There was the praenomen (personal name), nomen (family name), and cognomen, which indicated which branch of a family you were from. (For instance, Julius Caesar’s full name was actually Gaius Julius Caesar.) There was also a hierarchical element to the Roman naming system, as women generally only had two names and enslaved people often had only one. Middle names as we know them today arose in the Middle Ages, a time when faithful Europeans struggled between giving their children a family name or that of a saint. Eventually deciding that both would be preferable to one, they began the tradition of a child receiving a given name, baptismal name (saint’s name), and surname. That custom eventually reached America along with the people who emigrated there, with secular middle names becoming more common over time.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
