25 celebrities whose real names will surprise you

VENICE, ITALY – SEPTEMBER 05: Michael Caine attends the ‘My Generation’ photocall during the 74th Venice Film Festival at Sala Casino on September 5, 2017 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

Michael Caine (Maurice Micklewhite)

Maurice Micklewhite sounds so ridiculously British that it’s hard to believe it’s not a made up name. In fact, that’s actor Michael Caine’s birth name.

He went by the name Michael White, but one day he received a call from his agent with a job offer he could grab under one condition. “You can’t call yourself Michael White,” his agent said. “So give me another name.”

The actor saw a poster for the movie The Caine Mutiny starring Humphrey Bogart, and the rest is history.

Well, actually, it’s not history. Even though the actor has gone by that name since 1954, it wasn’t until recently that he made the name change legal!

Apparently, Caine got so annoyed by airport security questioning why his passport had a different name on it (since everyone knows him as Michael Caine) that he made the name official, as he revealed back in 2016.

“He would say, ‘Hi Michael Caine’, and suddenly I’d be giving him a passport with a different name on it,” he told The Sun. “I could stand there for up to an hour. So I changed my name.”