Throughout the 20th Century each and every actor with an excessively ethnic-sounding name knew they had to adopt an easy-to-pronounce, vaguely whitebread marquee name (no more than four syllables) in order to crash the big leagues.**
Hence Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, etc. No funny-sounding names…no names that Ma and Pa Bumblefuck couldn’t say or spell with ease.
In 1937 aspiring actor Mladen Sekulovich, a 25 year-old descendant of Bosnian Serbs who’d grown up in Chicago and worked in Indiana steel mills, was reportedly persuaded by Group Theatre colleague Elia Kazan to simplify his name.
So he changed the spelling of Mladen by switching the “la” to “al” and using Malden as his last name, junking his suspiciously Commie-sounding, four-syllable last name altogether, and chose “Karl” (in honor of his paternal grandfather) as his first name. Simple.
Karl Malden’s career took off after Kazan, who’d given up acting for directing, cast him as the basically decent, lunk-headed Mitch in the B’way stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947.
Malden felt proud of his Bosnian Serb ancestry but there’s no way in hell he “regretted” using a simplified name for professional purposes. If he hadn’t done that he never would have made it as a screen actor (perhaps not even as a stage actor), and he wouldn’t have wound up rich and famous and living in a flush home in Mandeville Canyon.
Oh, and he didn’t “insist” that this or that character in movies and TV shows that he starred in be called “Sekulovich”— he asked or urged or cajoled certain producers and directors into allowing the name to be heard.
“I despise inexactitude” — Hal Holbrook’s “Deep Throat” in All The President’s Men.
** Except for Allen Garfield and Keith Szarabajka.
