Ellen Burstyn and Ellen Barkin.
Also there’s Howard Stern the sleazebag radio host, and Howard K. Stern, Anna Nicole Smith’s sleazebag attorney.
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Jim Gaffigan once made a joke that sometimes people will walk up to him smiling until they realize that he isn’t Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Are we just talking about similar names, or are we also talking about similar appearance? Because appearance-wise I just learned last night that for many years someone I thought was one actress was actually someone else.
I had DVR’ed “Amadeus” when TCM had it on a couple weeks ago, and last nigtht I sat down to watch it. I had always thought that the actress who played Mozart’s wife was Olivia Barash, who also played Emilio Estevez’s girlfriend in “Repo Man”. Except it wasn’t. Mozart’s wife was played by another actress named Elizabeth Berridge.
My god it’s been 9 years and I still sometimes think of that thread. Especially for the line “Great balls of hey laaaaady!”
People think I’m so weird, but I often get Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman confused. The fact that Robert DeNiro played young Vito Corleone in the Godfather II doesn’t help. I can usually sort out Dustin Hoffman because I associate him with the Graduate, but De Niro and Pacino I associate with The Godfather, so then I have to remember that Al Pacino is the one from Meet The Parents. Then Dustin Hoffman played Ben Stiller’s father in the sequel and I got all confused again.
Until fairly recently, I kept getting Anna Faris and Anna Friel mixed up.
Earlier in thier careers I used to get Paul Newman and Steve McQueen mixed up,
also Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.
I used to think Det. Stabler (L&O:SVU) was Elias Koteas for the longest time
Did you know Christopher Meloni (Stabler) played Freakshow and the Grand Wizard in the Harold and Kumar movies?
Me too.
You just did it again! (That was DeNiro in “Meet the Parents”.)
Or did I just get whooshed?
DeNiro and Pacino are two I always get wrong.
And them two too.
I also have to remind myself frequently that Adam is not one of the Baldwin brothers - and he’s one of my favourite actors, too.
You stole my answer.
Wait, he’s not?
Nope! It’s the first ‘trivia’ entry in his IMDB listing.
Name-wise, I always get Elias Koteas and Adreas Katsulas (the “one armed man”) mixed up. Now that one of them is dead, it’s getting a little easier to keep them straight.
I’m embarrassed to say that I get Richard Gere and Warren Beatty mixed up (although I can eventually figure out which is which if I think about it for a while). They must share the same neuron in my brain or something.
If we’re not going by similar names then in the 80’s I’d sometimes confuse Stevie Wonder with Ray Charles and Madonna with Cindi Lauper.
Not quite on topic, but for some reason I was convinced for years that Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were brothers, to the extent that I was very surprised none of his obituaries mentioned it.
It took me a few years to sort out who was Daniel Craig and who was Clive Owen, I guess because they’re both British white guys of roughly the same age who sometimes do action movies.
I could swear there’s someone out there with a name very similar to Jason Statham that’s always causing me great confusion, but IMDb’s not helping me.
Oh yeah, I used to confuse DeNiro and Pacino, and Pacino and Hoffman, but never DeNiro and Hoffman. But it seems to me they’ve each gotten more distinctive with age.
There’s Dave Thomas the actor and Dave Thomas the Wendy’s founder. The actor even kind of looks like a younger version of the Wendy’s guy so when I first saw him I thought he might have been related.