What's in a name?
A few years ago, a novel was published in France under the name, The Revenge of Kevin. It told of a young man, unsurprisingly named Kevin, who decides to take revenge on all of those French intellectuals who looked down on him, condemned him to never be their equal, merely on the basis that he is called Kevin. Names are a funny business. We all, whether we like it or not, have a preconception of someone based on their names. We think we know what a Sandra, or a Becky, or a Thomas, or even a Kevin, will be like well before we meet them. This is why so many actors take stage names. Sometimes, it’s for legal reasons, such as Michael Keaton changing his name to avoid collisions with the already famous Michael Douglas, or Albert Brooks, the voice of Marlin in Finding Nemo, changing his name from Albert Einstein to avoid collisions with… I’m sure you can work it out. Sometimes, though, it really is just about the sound of it. Cary Grant was famously born Archibald Leach, a name so un-Ho