12 Origin Stories Behind Celebrity Names

We know the one-namers like Cher, Madonna, and Prince, but there’s a lot of your basic, run-of-the-mill celebrity names that you might’ve never known were “stage names” or “aliases” or whatever you want to call them. Lookin’ at you, Katy Perry. In her defense, she had a pretty good reason for opting out of her birth name. Surprise, surprise, Legend isn’t John’s real last name, and Diesel isn’t Vin’s. Come to think of it, his first name isn’t Vin either. “Diesel” must’ve helped him land all those car movies though.

Maybe they thought that their given name didn’t quite match their grandiose visions of success. They tried to mentally copy and paste their name from their birth certificate to a movie’s marquee, and it was just falling flat. Or maybe they had a curse word in their last name, and they spared us all from walking around with that word next to our shirt’s little polo player emblem. See what we did there? And whether they wanted us to find out or not, here are 12 quirky little origin stories behind celebrity names. 

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