My name is fame
To make it big in Hollywood/Bollywood or showbiz, it does not help to have a clunky, double/triple-barrelled or boring name like -- yawn -- Rajeev Bhatia (Akshay Kumar) or Spangler Arlington Brugh (Robert Taylor).

In the early days of Hollywood, in the 1920s, actors invariably found themselves a sexy, captivating screen name hoping it would catapault them to fame.

So Rodolpho d'Antonguolla became Rudy Valentino and American moviedom's first sex symbol.

Hispanic actress Margarita Cansino Carmen could never have been Hollywood's love goddess. But as Rita Hayworth she was.

And who can remember Issur Danielovitch Demsky? But we all loved triple-Academy-Award-nominated Kirk Douglas (Michael Douglas ke papa) in It Runs In The Family..

Actors or singers these days don't find it that important to adopt screen names or funky titles. So we have folks like Cameron Diaz (yes, that's her real name) and Halle Berry making it big on their original names, even if they are mouthfuls or a bit strange sounding.

But there are a few, intriguing exceptions:

Ever heard of Thomas Cruise Mapother IV? Yup, Tom Cruise was born with that whopper of a name. Mapother has been handed down to him courtesy his Welsh ancestry. Incidentally from his mom's side, he is related to George III of England.

By contrast his wife Katie's screen name is not very different from what she was born with -- Katherine Noelle Holmes.

But hey. why did name their child Suri? We thinks that if she follows in her parents' footsteps, she is going to need a snappy screem name like her dad.
Photograph: Tom Cruise with wife Katie Holmes and daughter Suri on the sets of the film Rubicon in Berlin in which Cruise is starring as Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic Nazi officer who mounted a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944 as Germany was losing World War II. Photograph: Sebastian Willnow/AFP/Getty Images