Christian Slater voices Slater on Archer, though AFAIK they haven’t revealed whether that’s the character’s first or last name.
“Slater” is a mononym on that show. Slater states it specifically at some point. Not sure how that fits into the OP’s scheme.
Mayor’s not a name, it’s a title. The character he plays is Adam We.
Greg Kinnear played a news reporter in 1964 Mississippi with the name Greg Kinnear in a movie about the murders of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwermer. (I guess it was the only way he’d be sure to get the line right.)
Katharine Hepburn played Mary, Queen of Scots in the movie Mary of Scotland. Fredrick March played her third husband, James, Earl of Bothwell. His surname was never used in the movie, but in real life it was Hepburn.
In The Maltese Falcon, Elisha Cook Jr. played the young gunsel (in the book version, he was also Joel Cairo’s gay lover) Wilmer Cook.
“Gay lover of somebody important” (a.k.a. “catamite”) is the primary definition of “gunsel.” The definition of the word as “gunman” is a secondary definition. The motion pictures censors and the publishers of the book missed what the word meant, so they allowed it in the book and the movie.
This is a bit of a cheat, but the actress who portrayed Anne Shirley in the 1934 film “Anne of Green Gables,” Dawn O’Day, changed her stage name to Anne Shirley after making the film. She then went on to reprise the role in “Anne of Windy Poplars.”
Huh… I encounter the word “gunsel” so rarely that I never paid it much mind. I just assumed it meant a thug with a gun.
[quote=“Wendell_Wagner, post:19, topic:693008”]
Maybe Fleming’s use of the phase “a Lonsdale kind of character” was a reference to this person:
…QUOTE]
That was my thought, though I didn’t recall the Russian name. I just knew of him as real life spy Gordon Lonsdale.
A lot of these are interesting, but are ignoring one of the OP’s key conditions:
The Abbott and Costello show had four: Abbott, Costello, Sidney Fields and Hillary Brooke. Somehow
Gordon Jones and Joe Besser got different names.
BD Wong played Dr. George Huang on L&O: SVU. “Huang” is pronounced “Wong.” People in the US of Chinese descent just got different transliterations when they immigrated, but it’s probably the same name. I know I see this among Jews all the time.
Yeah, but they all had the same first names, too. The OP asked about actors with the same *last *name but different *first *name than their character.
I can’t think of any instances where an actor played a character with the same first and last name, but I do know of one that had the same first and middle name.
On the television show “Reba”, the main character’s name was Reba Nell Hart and she was played by Reba Nell McEntire.