Now, aren't you ashamed of those suspicions you had about me?

Long before Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta changed her name to Lady Gaga, aspiring film stars were discarding their birth names in favour of more audience-friendly titles. Here are a few interesting ones from the Old Hollywood era:

Jean Arthur: Gladys Georgianna Greene
Cary Grant: Archibald Alexander Leach
Fred Astaire: Frederick Austerlitz
Doris Day: Doris von Kappelhoff
Greta Garbo: Greta Gustafsson
Marilyn Monroe: Norma Jeane Baker
Rock Hudson: Roy Scherer, Jr.
Joan Crawford: Lucille le Sueur
Audrey Hepburn: Audrey Kathleen Ruston
Judy Garland: Frances Gumm
Ginger Rogers: Virginia McMath

Undoubtedly there is a story behind each of these names, and most of them I don't know yet. I do know that Cary Grant chose his name when he signed his first contract with Paramount (no big surprise really, as Archie Leach was never going to go over well!). He took the first name Cary from a recent stage role he'd played, Cary Lockwood; the surname Grant came from running down an alphabetical list of names. Grant pokes fun at his birth names several times in his films, and even named one of his dogs Archibald in the 30s. Jean Arthur also has an interesting story: she is said to have chosen her name from two historical figures, Joan of Arc and King Arthur. Most of the time the studios required actors to change their names, and many of the names, you'll observe, are changed to disguise the actor's ethnic origins. Interesting.

Of course, Humphrey Bogart can only be a birth name. No one would take it by choice! (Sorry, still love you, Bogie).

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Sourced from here and here

Do you know about trouble dolls? I think they’re Guatemalan, and they’ve been given to me a lot over the years. The years in Peru, the years in Santa Fe—the floors and the ledges and the shelves were littered with trouble dolls, and my life was littered with trouble. Supposedly, you can pick up these little, handmade, beautiful dolls and tell them your worries, your troubles, then place them in their box and they will worry for you. So you can get some sleep. Well, I put all my troubles in cocaine and booze and heroine and pot and guns and pussy. Those were my trouble dolls. I should have confided in the dolls—the little, handmade ones—more often.

I have a point. I swear I do.

Marilyn was like a trouble doll for a lot of people: A lot of people needed her because she was beautiful and she was sweet and she was pretty much what a lot of people believed was a perfect woman—a sexual machine with a heart. And a lot of people needed her because they wanted her to fail or to cry or to die, because they wanted to believe that all of her gifts—physical and otherwise—wouldn’t save her or make her happy. So the ugly and the mean-spirited could feel better about their lives and their various lacks. And a lot of people looked at her and saw money and sex and power and an evil sort of joy that comes from getting off. She was a product, a commodity to them. And a lot of people needed her because she so clearly needed a friend, needed some love, and a lot of people really wanted to give this to her.

So Marilyn Monroe was this creamy, sweet, beautiful trouble doll for a lot of people, and we whispered to her image or her memory and told her what we needed, what we desired, and then we believed that things would happen or change.

And she got put in her box and was put on an eternal shelf, where we can continue to ask of her what we need.

-Dennis Hopper in an interview with James Grissom