Michael Keaton. Michael Douglas. Michael Keaton Douglas?
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” star Michael Keaton wants to start using his birth name professionally. But he’s not shedding the Keaton. He’s just adding a Douglas.
The “Dopesick” Emmy winner, who has been using “Michael Keaton” as his stage name since the 1970s, said he would like to use a hybrid of his famous moniker and his father’s last name, making him Michael Keaton Douglas.
Speaking with People, Keaton said that he had planned to used the three-name moniker on his most recent directorial effort, the dementia thriller “Knox Goes Away,” but “forgot” amid the stress of making the film.
“I said, ‘Hey, just as a warning, my credit is going to be Michael Keaton Douglas.’ And it totally got away from me. And I forgot to give them enough time to put it in and create that. But that will happen,” said Keaton, who turned 73 on Thursday.
The actor’s professional name has its own storied lore.
Keaton said he might have picked his stage name out of a phone book at the start of his career. He was not allowed to use his birth name because what was then the Screen Actors Guild already had a Michael Douglas in its ranks — the “Wall Street” Oscar winner, whose late father, Kirk Douglas, actually changed his name from Issur Danielovitch Demsky.
The guild also already had talk-show host Mike Douglas registered too. So Keaton, like many who adopt stage names, turned to an unlikely place to choose the name that would ultimately identify him in “Night Shift,” “Mr. Mom,” “Beetlejuice,” “Batman” and the Oscar-nominated “Birdman.”
“I was looking through — I can’t remember if it was a phone book,” he told People. “I must’ve gone, ‘I don’t know, let me think of something here.’ And I went, ‘Oh, that sounds reasonable.’”
Reasonable enough. Alas, Keaton has no blood relation to “Annie Hall” star Diane Keaton, whose real name is actually Diane Hall.
