Edgar Rice Burroughs
Olivia Newton-John
Irene and Pierre Joliet-Curie
Pierre Elliot Trudeau
William Jennings Bryan
Philip Seymour Hoffman
David Lee Roth
The voice of an angel – of death!
Lee J. Cobb
R. Lee Ermey
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Edward G. Robinson
Sue Ane Langdon
James Clerk Maxwell (renowned equationist)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (poet and monk)
Frederick Gowland Hopkins (pioneering biochemist, discoverer of vitamins, and a distant cousin of the above poet)
Eric Frank Russell (science fiction author)
James Mark Baldwin (early American psychologist)
John Broadus Watson (another very influential American psychologist, who got the job of the one above after Baldwin was caught in a raid on a negro brothel, and then lost it again for shagging his grad student)
John Julius Norwich (aristocratic historian and broadcaster, Lord kNickers Off Ready When I Come Home)
David Lloyd-George (one of Britain’s most important 20th century politicians, last Liberal UK Prime Minister)
Robin Wright-Penn (best thing to do with a pen)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English poet and philosophotaster)
Samuel Coleridge Taylor (African-American composer, very much to be confused with the above)
John Stewart Mill (insufficiently obscure philosopher)
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (renowned mongoose)
And, for the win: Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Le Chevalier de Lamarck (evolutionary theorist)
An aside: anyone interested in the many famous people who have dropped or changed their first/given names might find this an amusing read.
Not even.
Try Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim.
Njtt: What do you have against Mill?
Contributions:.Florence Griffith Joyner and her sister-in-law Jackie Joyner Kersee.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Charles Nelson Reilly
I loved this. Plus, renowned mongoose sounds so impressive.
Mary Tyler Moore
It’s because assassins and mass murderers become famous due to their crimes. Which means they’re usually being identified to the media from police statements. And identifying suspects by their full legal name is standard police procedure.
So the family and friends who knew Lee Oswald before November 22, 1963 didn’t use his middle name. But all the rest of us first heard about him from police reports saying Lee Harvey Oswald had shot the President.
Courtney Cox Arquette
Courtney Thorn-Smith
Jamie Lee Curtis
Meredith Baxter-Birney
Rachael Leigh Cook
One of the most important:
Jerry Lee Lewis
Indeed. Made me think we haven’t mentioned Tommy Lee Jones!
Sugar Ray Leonard
Sugar Ray Robinson
Billy Ray Cyrus
Okay, then, why is this so common?
And where does the “first” or “given” name end, and the “family name” or “surname” begin?
Often, the second and third of the three names are treated together as the “last name”.
For example, David Lloyd George’s surname was Lloyd George
Arthur Conan Doyle is often referred to as Conan Doyle, as if that is his last name. Apparently, his last name was just Doyle, although at some point he began using Conan Doyle as if it were his last name.
I’ve often seen George Bernard Shaw referred to as Bernard Shaw as if that were his last name, although I don’t see anything in his wiki to support that.
It seems very common for people to have a two-part surname, judging by how often I see names used that way in news articles. And that’s not even counting Spanish or Latin American people with names in the Hispanic style.
John Paul Jones
James Fenimore Cooper
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Jennifer Love Hewitt
Lisa Marie Presley
Sandra Day O’Connor
Stevie Ray Vaughan