This is a tough one to get into a sentence. But think about this.
Kirk Douglas never played a character named Issur Danielovitch Demsky. It would be funny if he did because that was his real birth name. Weirdly, some guy named Alex Menglet played the role of Issur Demsky in an obscure movie named The Long Lunch.
George Burns, born Nathan Birnbaum, never played either a Nathan or a Birnbaum, although a real life Nathan Birnbaum was the composer of a couple of movie scores.
Cyd Charisse knew more than well that she should never take a role as Tula Ellice Finklea, even if she had been born with the name. Lots of other woman have played characters named Tula, including Kate Winslet.
So why would Jean Byron, possessor of a classic anglo-saxon white bread poetically referential stage name ever want to play a character who went by Imogene Burkhart? Yet she did. Her character on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was called Dr. Imogene Burkhart, her real birth name.
We’ve done characters named the same as the actor before. But those were always current names. Has there ever been another case where an actor for fun played his or her old discarded name? Jean Byron was a friend of show creator Max Shulman, which explains the in joke. You’d think that another pair would pull the same joke sometime somewhere.
All I could come up with is a character named after the real name of an actor but the role is played by another actor: John Cleese played barrister Archie Leach in A Fish Called Wanda. Archibald Leach was the real name of Cary Grant.
Not quite the same thing, but Karl Malden (born Mladen Sekulovich) regretted having to change his name and tried to get a character with that name in each of his movies. In Patton, for example, Gen. Bradley is dodging fire and says to another soldier “give me that helmet, Sekulovich!”
Not exactly the actor playing his own name but Michael Knight is an actor and the name of the lead character on Knight Rider that is not a car. The current lead in the new Knight Rider played the son of the character played by actor Michael Knight on the soap opera, All My Children.
Actor Creed Bratton plays Creed Bratton on The Office. The character once said that he transfers his debt to false identity he created named William Charles Schneider.
Yes, but he was playing John Horatio Malkovich, whereas the actor’s name is John Gavin Malkovich.
“Hey, weren’t you in that jewel thief movie?”
In a similar vein, while he didn’t play the character, Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into the movie Adaptation as a screenwriter struggling to adapt the Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a movie and failing, instead writing a movie about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman trying to write an adaptation of The Orchid Thief into a movie, ad nauseam. He also writes of his fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman, who is essentially Charlie’s unrestrained id.
On The Wire, Delaney Williams plays Baltimore homicide sergeant Jay Landsman. Former Baltimore homicide detective Jay Landsman has the minor but frequently-recurring role of Lieutenant Dennis Mello on the same show.
In the DVD commentaries he is invariably referred to as “The Real Jay Landsman”.