Some of these are easy. Some celebs changed their names after their conversion to a different religion (Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. to Muhammad Ali; Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). Others changed their names to give it some pop and flavor in entertainment (Can you imagine saying Steveland Judkins instead of Stevie Wonder?). Some adopted a new style of saying their names when someone just as famous already had the name (up-and-coming musician Ray Robinson started going by his first and middle names, Ray Charles, because the boxer, (Sugar) Ray Robinson, was far more popular at that time ). Others may have swapped names in order to increase their entertainment marketability (from Carlos Irwin Estevez to Charlie Sheen for example), as outlined by HuffPost.
But other famous folks changed their names for other reasons that are not as well known, some of which is detailed in zelo.com.
Below are names of celebrities who changed their names and what their real names actually are,
1. Stage name: Whoopi Goldberg
Birth name: Caryn Johnson:
Triva: Whoopi’s stage name was taken from a whoopi cushion. She has stated,. according to PEOPLE, that “If you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go. So people used to say to me, ‘You’re like a whoopee cushion.’ And that’s where the name came from. She adopted the traditionally German/Jewish surname Goldberg as a stage name because her mother felt the original surname of Johnson was not “Jewish enough” to make her a star.
