Fifty years after making his debut, 73-year-old actor Michael Keaton is requesting to be addressed by his birth name. Born Michael Douglas, he adopted a different stage name when he joined the Screen Actors Guild because another member already held his original name.
According to legend, Keaton came up with his now-iconic name while flipping through a phone book. “I was looking through— I can’t remember if it was a phone book,” he told People. “I must’ve thought, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here,’ and then I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable.’”
While he still can’t use his birth name due to the fame of Michael Douglas, known for films like Wall Street and Traffic, Keaton hopes to combine both names moving forward. He intended to use the name “Michael Keaton Douglas” for his 2023 film “Know Goes Away,” but admitted he simply “forgot” to make the change amid the production’s demands.
“I said, ‘Hey, just as a warning, my credit is going to be Michael Keaton Douglas.’ And it totally got away from me. I didn’t give them enough time to make that happen. But it will happen,” he stated. He will also appear as Michael Keaton in the upcoming film “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
