10 Hollywood Actors Names You Don't Really Know

Real Name: Natalia Zakharenko

West Side Story star Natalie Wood was born Natalia Zakharenko in 1938 to Russian immigrant parents in San Francisco. By the time she embarked upon her acting career at the tender age of five, she was going by the name Natasha Gurdin – the former being a Russian pet form of Natalia and Gurdin being a surname her father had adopted in an effort to sound less Russian when looking for employment, what with anti-Russian sentiment running rampant and the McCarthy era being right around the corner.

After a move to Hollywood and a contract with International Pictures in the mid-1940s, studio executives decided Natasha Gurdin was still too ethnic-sounding so plumped for Natalie - the anglicised form of her first name – and Wood after Goodbye, Mr Chips director Sam Wood.

It was a common move during Hollywood’s Golden Age to take on a more American-sounding stage name and when Natalie’s younger sister Svetlana Gurdin followed suit when she too took up acting changing her name to Lana Wood.