Michael Keaton, or more accurately, Michael Douglas, is ready to use his own name after more than 50 years in the entertainment industry.
When he started, the union already had Michael Douglas, the son of three-time Academy Award nominee Kirk Douglas, and talk show host Mike Douglas, who eventually went by Mike and hosted the daytime program The Mike Douglas Show from 1961 to 1981. Since the Screen Actors Guild prohibits members from using another member’s professional name, The Founder star became Michael Keaton.
“I was looking through—I can’t remember if it was a phone book,” the 73-year-old—who celebrates his birthday on Sept. 5—recalled to PEOPLE in an interview published on Sept. 4. “I must’ve gone, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here.’ And I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable.’”
But now, as a Hollywood legend, Keaton—whose name appears as Michael Keaton in his latest movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—wants to return to his origins, or at least incorporate them, as he plans to be credited professionally as Michael Keaton Douglas, a combination of his stage name and his real name.
“I said, ‘Hey, just as a warning, my credit is going to be Michael Keaton Douglas,’” Keaton shared about his new movie, Knox Goes Away, which he directed. He added, “It totally got away from me. And I forgot to give them enough time to put it in and create that.”
But he promised that the altered name would eventually make its debut in the credits: “That will happen.”
In the early ’90s, Keaton addressed the topic during a 1992 stop on the Batman Returns press tour.
After Terry Wogan acknowledged that he wasn’t using his real name, the Batman star told the interviewer, “Because there were already two people in the union with the name Michael Douglas, I got a job, and contractually, you couldn’t have people with the same name.”
Keaton then said of the star of films like Basic Instinct and Wall Street that when he finally met the Oscar winner, “he’s a good guy, actually.”
But, he added, “That’s not even his real name! I’m the only one who had the name. That’s the irony here.”
Douglas’s father, born Issur Danielovitch, was forced to Americanize his surname in a bid to assimilate, but the Fatal Attraction actor was, in fact, born Michael Douglas.
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