Dear colleagues:



Some  young actors  in the early 1930s bore "premature names," which seem  

improbably coincidental, or else I've missed something somewhere along the line.



1.  British actress Norah BARING in Hitchcock's "Murder" (1930) played a young 

woman wrongly accused of murder, whose character is supposedly named "Diana 

BARING."  Hitch's text suppsedly derives from  Clemence Dane's 1928-29 stage 

play and/or novel, "Enter Sir John."  Seems a bit improbable that Dane's literary 

text,  written long before anyone knew it would ever become a film at all, could 

have given the leading female character the same surname as that of the actress 

who considerably later would wind up being cast in that role on the screen. Perhaps 

Dane's literary rtext had assigned the heroine a different name, but the film version 

renamed the character to fit the actress...? 



2.   U.S. actor Tom BROWN in Wyler's "Tom Brown of Culver" (1932)  played the 

young hero, who bore that  identical name ("Tom Brown").  Evidently the concept 

of a young man going away to school, enduring and  eventually triumphing over 

many setbacks & humiliations in study, life, and sports, derived from Thomas 

Hughes' British novel about Rugby,  "Tom Brown's School Days" (1857).   If we 

assume Mr Hughes was no Nostradamus and could hardly have predicted,  75 

years before the fact, who would play the lead role in a film (!) adaptation of 

his  book, then we are confronted by quite a coincidence, or there is some other 

reasonable explanation.... 



3.  Evidently the case of U.S. actress Anne SHIRLEY being cast in the role of "Anne 

Shirley" in "Anne of Green Gables" (1934) is different.  As I understand, before that 

film was made at RKO studio, the youthful actress bore  different names, "Dawn Paris" 

and "Dawn O'Day" [sic]. But the powers that be at RKO  decided to change her real name,

to fit the name of the character she played.  That's Hollywood.  Which leads me to wonder,  

could "Tom  Brown" (the Hollywood actor), similarly,  have borne a different real name, 

before he was cast in  the role of "Tom Brown" in Wyler's 1932 film...? 



Gratefully,

Steven P Hill,

University of Illinois.

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