The Same Name Game V
Continuing a confusing tradition.
A while back, I did a handful of pieces in reference to “The Same Name Game,” a Don Hauptman tradition, and celebrated all the famous names I could find then that were completely the same, sounded the same, or were close enough to get confused. But I hadn’t made my more recent list of A-to-C-list celebrities then, and when I did…I found some new matches.
In fact, out of two homophones and eight full matches, the only match I found that I’d covered before was Peyton List and Peyton List (pictured and referenced here). Today and tomorrow, I’ll reveal the others:
Michael Cimino has appeared in the lead role of Love, Victor (2020-2022), as well as in Never Have I Ever (2020-2023), Annabelle Comes Home (2019), and Senior Year (2022).
The late Michael Cimino was a director best known for The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars…and Heaven’s Gate, a costly failure that became a synonym for “box office bomb” and blew up Cimino’s career. (He made a few more films after that, but nothing nearly as notable.)
Curiously, both these clips relate to teaching people about shots. I didn’t plan that, it just happened. A less fun coincidence: both director and actor had to contend with malicious rumors about their sexuality.
Robert Taylor was a popular leading man in the Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s, best known for getting his fellow actors blacklisted as Communists Quo Vadis and a number of tough-guy Westerns.
Today, Robert Taylor is an Australian actor best known for the six-season Longmire, a tough-guy Western, and the movie Focus.
David Cross is an actor and comedian with many animated roles, stand-up comedy specials, and a long run as Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development.
David Kross is known for The Reader and War Horse and is slated to play Hitler in the upcoming King’s Man sequel (or second Kingsman prequel? Whatever, one of those). I’m afraid I can’t make any easy cross-Cross-Kross comparisons, though!
Anne Ramsey (with an ey) played a couple of horrible moms in Throw Momma from the Train (below) and The Goonies. She also did Scrooged and Any Which Way You Can. Sadly, she only had a few years to enjoy her greatest fame, passing away in 1988.
Anne Ramsay (with an ay) is another gifted comedienne best known for Mad About You, but she’s taken on serious roles as well in A League of Their Own, Planet of the Apes, and most recently in the seance horror film Brooklyn 45. In this Mad About You clip, she intrudes on a home video project without knowing the cameras are running…
Mike Henry is a white voice actor and in-person actor who’s often worked with Seth MacFarlane: somewhat controversially, one of his roles was Family Guy’s Black neighbor Cleveland Brown, who headlined the brief spinoff The Cleveland Show. Here he is as the spotted-sphere-headed Lt. Dann on MacFarlane’s The Orville.
Mike Henry was the Tarzan of the 1960s, with side roles in Smokey and the Bandit and Soylent Green. In case you’re wondering what Tarzan was like in the 1960s, this clip has him fighting a helicopter using jungle savvy, a machine gun, and an improvised bola with hand grenades on its ends.
Tomorrow: A few more prominent cases!