HANDLE WITH CARE

Oscar winner Emma Stone has expressed a preference for 'Emily' rather than the acting moniker she was forced to adopt early on. Helen Coffey ponders the power of names

Sometimes, it feels like I’m living a double life. Not in any grandiose, dramatic way – there’s no secret agent, 007 glamour to any of it. It’s just that, almost by accident, I ended up with two names. There’s “Helen”: my professional self, a journalist who lived in London for over a decade. And then there’s “Lenni”: my off-the-clock self, who moved to a seaside town, loves smugly bragging about winter swimming, and inexplicably started writing songs on the ukulele for the first time in her thirties.

They are, of course, one and the same person. But they feel different – it’s like going between wearing a pair of dungarees and a formal trouser suit. Both items fit me just fine, but my physicality – the way I move through the world and my attitude towards it – subtly shifts when I’m wearing each one.

Anyone who has a given name and a sobriquet understands the strange binding of identity that’s inherent within a handful of letters. It’s why Emma Stone’s partiality to being called by her real name – Emily – is back in the media spotlight again. The Oscar-winning actor hasn’t made a big song and dance of it; she’s merely stated several times that, given the choice, she’d rather go by the name that feels more like her than the stage name she was forced to adopt at the start of her career (“Emily Stone” being already taken by another member of the Sag-Aftra actors’ union).