I recently adopted a black cat who came from the rescue with the name Freddie Mercury. I liked the name enough to keep it, though I generally just call him Merc or The Merc.
Do you have a cat or cats named for notable humans, living or dead?
Obligatory catpic if I can get it to load: The Merc blissing out on fresh-picked catnip.
My cat Wilson is named for Wilson Pickett. Good god, y’all!
My Yorkie was named Grace Kelly. Apparently the lady who bred her named all her puppies movie star names.
The Siamese cats are registered and have fancy names but I just named them myself.
All the other cats have names by me. Except Cat the barn Cat. She’s just Cat.
One of our “rental cats” at our previous place (we lived with a different set of daffy landlord and landlady) was named Jack Daniels. (The other one was named Mocha.)
My cats are named for obscure fictional characters (Roxy from Homestuck and Khoshekh from Welcome to Nightvale), but our last, late lamented dog was named Weaver in honor of Dexter Weaver. His soul food restaurant’s slogan inspired the R.E.M. album title “Automatic For The People.”
Many years ago I named my cat Woody, after Woody Allen.
mmm
We have a cat named Bruce. After Bruce Wayne.
If we’re going with fictional characters’ names too, then I’ll toss in the name of my other cat, also black: Sally Forth, after the cartoon character.
Freshman year, IIT, Crown Hall, a kitten tugged on my boot laces, ended up my fraternity room pet for the year. Kitty was named Mies (as in Ven der Rohe).
I had a cat named Milli after Milli Vanilli because when it was a kitten it would lip sync a meow without any sound.
No famous people here, but I did have two cats named after US cities: San Francisco and Denver.
Did you call the first one Frisco for short?
Sure did. Heck, we’d often shorten it to just “Frisk.” And Denver was often called “Denny.”
Little story: when we moved from Toronto to Calgary, we flew. Our cats flew in the cargo hold. I put “My name is Denny” on a sticker on his carrier, because if I had put, “My name is Denver” on his carrier, I’d be worried that he might have ended up in Colorado.
No problem; he got to Calgary with us.
Of course. As I’ve mentioned before (ten or fifteen years ago or something, damn aging brain), my current surviving cat is named Rupert. Very pretentiously named after general, admiral and artist Prince Rupert Wittlesbach of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland. Aside from just being an extremely interesting character in general, Prince Rupert was famously closely associated with a dog that made me think of my cat (that was found as a stray kitten enthusiastically trailing after someone’s pet dog in the middle of nowhere). Rupert (my cat) loves dogs.
For many years I had a second cat that I got to keep Rupert busy, as he was a hyperactive kitten. He was originally a black shelter kitten named “Grapes.” They got along well, but though smaller he would beat up Rupert when Rupert got over-amped up. So I named him Ollie after Prince Rupert’s arch-nemesis Oliver Cromwell 
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No one can out-pretentious history majors when naming pets 
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Heh. You need to get an orange tiger boy and name him Ashurbanipal.
I worked for a vet for a spell when I was in my early 30’s and going thru college.
They had a frequent client.
A Himalayan.
Named Genghis Khan.
Yes, with a matching attitude. Woe be to your fingers if you dared to insert them into his cage.
Most of our various cats were named after old time show biz personalities we liked. Gracie, who was a bit goofy at times, was named for Gracie Allen. (We didn’t have a George.) Jack, who was smart and funny in a deadpan way, for Jack Benny. Bogie is a very cool customer and was named for Humphrey Bogart, my favorite actor. We named our latest Mickey, because his red fur is like Mickey Rooney’s red hair, and he’s a bit of a rapscallion.
All were raised from kittens except for Jack, who was a two-year-old stray we adopted. We didn’t know what his name had been, so we called him Jack, and within 24 hours he decided he liked it and began responding to it. We often wondered if that had actually been his name before.
Two exceptions were Button, who had a marking on her back that looked like a button, and Rocky, a name we had decided on for a cat long before he was adopted. He was a Japanese bobtail, and the day before we picked him up my wife suggested we call him Lucky, because in Japan, bobtails are revered as lucky cats. I thought we should stick with Rocky. She looked up the word “lucky” on a translation site and found that in Japanese, the word for lucky is “Rakkī!” Weird, huh?
Cats. We just love 'em!
I named one cat Hubble. It was an unfortunate name because he liked to go exploring, and one day he didn’t come back from his adventures.
When I was a teen, we got two kittens, that I named Groucho and Harpo. Groucho was very loud. Harpo never meowed. He must have had a brain problem because he died of a seizure shortly after we got him.
Groucho ended up getting pregnant (yes, Groucho was a she, I never let things like that get in the way of a good name)
She had a litter of 3 kittens that I named Waylon, Willie and the Boy. Because he was the only boy of the three
If fictional characters count, our cat is named Butters. The vet gets a laugh out of it.
When I adopted my cat, the name she had was Tessla (with 2 S’s). I don’t know if she was named specifically for the inventor, the electric car company, or perhaps something else entirely.