Here’s one: Paul Anka is widely perceived to be Italian, and I’ve heard him say that, ages ago, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack took him under their wings because THEY thought he was Italian.
He’s actually a Lebanese-Canadian.
John Mahoney, the dad in Frasier, sounds and acts like a typical American. Imagine my surprise when I found out he was born in England during World War II.
Cite: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001498/bio
He lost his accent when he joined the U.S. Army.
The public tends to think that Nathan Lane is Jewish because he does the “Zero Mostel” comedic styling so well, but he’s a Catholic boy. Or so he said on Inside The Actor’s Studio.
That’s the standard pronunciation here in Israel.
The pants are called LEE-vice.
Joel grew up as basically the only Jewish kid in a predominantly Italian-Catholic neighborhood in Long Island. Apparently all his friends were Italian, and he grew up immersed in Catholic culture.
Thank you! I thought I was going nuts.
He’s a graduate of St. Francis Prep, a Catholic high school in Queens, NY.
Catherine Zeta-Jones has been cast as Middle-Eastern, and Spanish, despite actually being Welsh. 
The one who really took me by surprise was Khigh Dhiegh , who played Chinese characters )or, more rarely, Japanese ones) such as Wo Fat in Hawaii Five-O, or Four Finger Wu in Noble House, or others in a host of TV shows and movies. His biggest part was as Judge Djien-dje Dee in Nicholas Meyer’s TV movie of Robert van Gulik’s The Haunted Monastery.
It turns out that he had not a bit of any oriental in him – his real name was Kenneth Dickerson, and “Khigh Dhiegh” (and the other elaborate spellings he used) was just his initials “K.D.” gussied up with weird spelling. He was Angle-Egyptian-Sudanese. In the aforementioned Judge Dee movie he was, ironically, the only non-Oriental actor in the cast, although I didn’t realize this until years later.
To straighten out the comment made earlier on Robert De Niro’s ancestry, his father was of Italian and Irish descent and his mother was of German, French, and Dutch descent.
I guess that shows how worthless my human-pattern-matching can be. :eek:
ABC Afternoon Special moral: Yeah, your brain evolved to find patterns in too-little information, but the internet now provides that information. Whether it’s true or not, well, your brain has research capabilities, too.