rockwell stockwell

I've been confusing Dean Stockwell and Sam Rockwell for a long time. Their names are similar enough that I convinced myself it was the same person. I think it happened around the time I started watching the TV show "Quantum Leap," which I didn't watch when it originally aired, but rather when it went into syndication. Whenever that was, I guess Sam Rockwell was in something that I liked, and then I saw another episode of the show and saw Dean Stockwell's name and convinced myself - even though Dean Stockwell is 32 years older than Sam Rockwell - that it was the same actor. I probably even muddled the names when I was talking about "him" to someone else, enough so that I didn't get questioned on it.

In the last week or so, S and I watched Long Day's Journey Into Night, with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell. The play was written in 1942, was very autobiographical - Eugene O'Neill put it in a vault and said that it should not be published until 25 years after his death (but his third wife went against his wishes, and it was published in 1956, three years after his death). The film was made in 1962, but was filmed in black and white, which S tells me was the way they did things back then - dramas in B&W, comedies in color.

In the movie, Katharine Hepburn plays a woman going mad essentially (helped along by morphine and some bad memories), and the actress was just starting to get the shaky head which she said she inherited from her grandfather, not from Parkinson's disease. So, it was a little confusing to see an aging Hepburn in a B&W film. And there was young Sam Rockwell-- er, Dean Stockwell, playing her young son.

And now Moon just came out, starring Sam Rockwell. I went to see it last night with M&J. It's a very good movie, but I'm not here to issue spoilers. When we were getting into the car after the movie, I made a comment about the fact that Sam Rockwell was in Long Day's Journey (which J watched a few minutes of with S and me when it was playing at the house), and J was like, "No way! That couldn't have been him, that movie was from like the '40s or something!" And I was confident that I was right. "Strange as it may seem, it's true!"

But you can't get away with anything these days. We both pulled out our iPhones and started doing research, and before too long at all, I realized my mistake: "It was Dean Stockwell," I said. To which (in my defense) M said, "Oh, my god! It's his son!"

Very confusing. But anyway, Sam Rockwell is not Dean Stockwell, he's not even his son. The only thing they have in common is that they're both actors, and they have big eyebrows.