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Here's why Emergency! star Randolph Mantooth refused to change his name
Randolph Mantooth had a name worth fighting for!
William Shakespeare famously asked, "What’s in a name?" For Randolph Mantooth, the answer was complicated.
The Emergency! star spent much of his childhood being teased for his unusual surname, but when he was later encouraged to change it, he refused.
In an interview with The Sacramento Bee, Mantooth recalled how his name made him a target for bullies, sometimes leading to fights on the schoolyard.
"When I was a kid I obviously had a lot of problems with that name," Mantooth said. "It's an easy name to make fun of and I was Womantooth, Babytooth, Tigertooth... you name it."
"Being that I grew up in forty-six different states, it was a never-ending problem. All of a sudden I'd be down on the floor wrestling, just over my name. I became a fighter and a bluffer."
Actors sometimes adopt stage names to make them more recognizable or easier to pronounce. But for Mantooth, changing his name would have meant giving in to something he'd spent years defending.
When the suggestion came up early in his acting career, he was determined to stand his ground.
"When I became an adult and it was suggested I would have to change my name and all of a sudden I got a flash of that old feeling," Mantooth said. "It was going to be that same thing again, down on the floor. I had to fight over it since I was a kid, I was damned if I was going to change it."
In the end, Mantooth kept the name he grew up fighting for — and made it his own in Hollywood.
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