Can We Reframe the Same Name Game? (1 of 2)
How to keep track of confusion?
Did you hear the one about Shakespeare’s wife and the actress from Interstellar and The Princess Diaries? Only one had a Will, but they were both Anne Hathaway.
Some time ago, I posted about “The Same Name Game,” a piece that—to correct what I said then—was published by Richard Lederer through his syndicated column and put together by Don Hauptman, as research for a possible book on the topic. (I also noted that Fiona found it a decent bed, and as I begin this article, she’s snoozing on top of it yet again.)
It revolves around famous or notable people who have the same first and last name—or close enough. Real people are given priority, but fictional ones show up now and then. Despite SAG-AFTRA policies that forbid two actors from having the same name, a few same-namers have slipped through, like Peyton List and Peyton List.
One was born in 1998 and starred in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies as well as TV's School Spirits. The other was born in 1986 and has appeared on Mad Men and various other TV series.
More often, you’ll get people whose names match but whose life paths are different. Matthew Perry and Richard Burton are the names of actors; they are also the names of explorers. David Copperfield, from the Dickens novel bearing his name, is no real relation to the stage magician.
Lederer, still crediting Hauptman, put out a revised edition of the same-name game in 2013. Two years ago, a Buzzfeed piece by Kristen Harris tracked some of the same parallels and added some new ones. The pairings above can be found in those earlier works.
In fact, there were a lot of good ones in there…which tends to make me wonder what I can add.
My original plan for today’s post was to try to systematize all the famous-name overlaps in existence, tracking them through Wikipedia disambiguation pages and other sources. But it wasn’t long before I realized I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
At this writing, Wikipedia reports that it has 77,092 “human name disambiguation” pages. So that’s 77,092 names, each held by more than one person. Sometimes a lot more. Wikipedia has listings for about 288 different guys named “William Smith.” Or some mild variation thereof.
“Wikipedia fame” is not always the same as actual fame. But it’s enough to merit consideration, at least.
Two William Smiths have been well known in the Hollywoods of different eras: action star William Smith of Any Which Way You Can and Hawaii 5-O, and rapper turned actor Will Smith of Independence Day and Men in Black…
But it’s hard to say where to draw the line. Going through a literal million same-named people would soon be exhausting for you readers as well as me. But should I comb through a hundred? Two thousand? There’s always the chance of missing something interesting that you’d get from five more minutes of searching. And you have to weigh that on the scales, next to all the other stuff you planned to get done today.
So, in this as in many of my endeavors, I’ll have to resign myself to the guarantee of incompleteness. Tomorrow: the best pairs I could find that aren’t in the links above or the cat-fur-laden papers on my desk. Til then!