IStock Photo 11734467 © ldambies

Including this year's nominees, 411 different men and women have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress since 1927—and 118 of them have changed their last name on the way to the red carpet. The odds an actor or actress nominated for the top Oscar has changed his or her last name are 1 in 3.48. And it’s more likely for women (1 in 3.03) than for men (1 in 4.08).

The early Hollywood moguls established the pattern: Shmuel Gelbfisz became Samuel Goldwyn (the G in MGM), and Wilhelm Fried became William Fox (of what later became 20th Century Fox). Actors and actresses followed suit.

Many of them did so to hide ethnicity, out of fear of discrimination and also a desire to fashion a name made for the marquee. Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk Douglas, Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis, Anna Italiano became Anne Bancroft, and Krishna Bhanji became Ben Kingsley.

And if you are shooting for movie stardom, why not go for an idealized version of your old self? Marion Morrison and Norma Jean Mortensen became icons once they glamorized their names to John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. There can be the desire to establish your own identity—Angelina Voight and Nicholas Coppola earned a bit of space from their showbiz families when they became Angelina Jolie and Nicolas Cage. Or the need to avoid confusion, like the young actor who happened to be named Michael Douglas—but had no relation to Kirk Douglas or his son Michael. He chose to adopt the stage name of Michael Keaton.

But many more actors are going by their birth names now than ever did in the past. Before 1954, the men and women nominated for the Best Actor and Actress awards were more than twice as likely (1 in 2.21) to have changed their names than they have been since (1 in 4.49). Much of that change is a result of the end of the old Hollywood studio system, crumbling by the 1950’s. Under the studio system, actors were tied to exclusive contracts with specific studios, which had near-complete control over their public personas, including their names. After the end of the studio system, forced name changes became much more rare.

Of this year’s nominees, only one performs under a last name he or she wasn’t born with: Dame Helen Mirren, who was born in London, to a family of Russian émigrés, with the regal name of Iliana Lydia Petrovna Mironova.

The current generation of Hollywood actors appears more comfortable performing under their own names. Both Adam Goldberg (star of The Hebrew Hammer) and Rachel Weisz (who won an Oscar for The Constant Gardener) considered changing their name to something less recognizably Jewish, but thought better of it. And 2007 Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen performs under his birth name, unlike prior Scandinavian-American stars like Gloria Swanson (née Svensson) and Greta Garbo (née Gustafsson).

Even when name changes still occur, they’re less often motivated by a desire to hide ethnicity. Winona Horowitz may have dumped her last name for Ryder, but in a move that would have been inconceivable in the 1930’s, Caryn Johnson found fame on stage and screen when she reinvented herself as Whoopi Goldberg. The star of the hit show “Chuck” did something similar. Zachary Levi Pugh decided to drop his last name because of the way it sounded, and—though, like Whoopi, he’s not Jewish—he became simply Zachary Levi.

Actors make a living by being something they’re not—and being a star is often just another role to play. So we can expect actors and actresses seeking a new life to continue to adopt new names as symbols of their rebirth. But it will be a matter of choice rather than necessity. In the early years of Hollywood, no one with a last name like Rachel Weisz’s came anywhere close to a marquee; now, she’s one of the most prominent actresses in the world. That’s good progress.