Michael Keaton. Michael Douglas. Michael Keaton Douglas?
Beetlejuice star Michael Keaton wants to start using his birth name professionally. But he won't be ditching the Keaton, just adding the Douglas.
The Emmy winner for “Dopesick,” who has been using “Michael Keaton” as his stage name since the 1970s, said he would like to use a hybrid of his famous nickname and his father’s last name, becoming Michael Keaton Douglas.
Speaking to People, Keaton said he had planned to use the three-name moniker in his latest directorial effort, the dementia thriller “Knox Goes Away,” but “forgot” amid the stress of making the film.
“I said, ‘Hey, just as a warning, my credit will go to Michael Keaton Douglas. ’ And it completely got out of hand. And I forgot to give them enough time to get it in and create it. But that will happen,” said Keaton, who turned 73 on Thursday. Born: 5/9/1951
The actor's professional name has its own story.
Keaton said he may have picked his stage name from a phone book early in his career. He wasn’t allowed to use his birth name because what was then the Screen Actors Guild already had a Michael Douglas in its ranks — the “Wall Street” Oscar winner whose late father, Kirk Douglas, actually changed his name from Issur Danielovitch Demsky.
The union already had talk show host Mike Douglas on file, so Keaton, like many others who adopt stage names, looked to an unexpected place to choose the name that would eventually identify him in “Night Shift,” “Mr. Mom,” “Beetlejuice,” “Batman” and the Oscar-nominated “Birdman.”
“I was looking at… I don’t remember if it was a phone book,” she told People. “I must have been like, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something. ’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable. ’”
That makes sense. Unfortunately, Keaton is not related by blood to “Annie Hall” star Diane Keaton, whose real name is Diane Hall.
