Martin Sheen is a household name, but the actor opened up about why he decided to go by a stage name instead of his birth name over the years.

Sheen yearned to be an actor from an early age as the child of immigrants from County Tipperary, a county in Ireland, and Galicia, an autonomous community of Spain.

“I would go to the movies and be enthralled,” he told Closer Weekly in June 2022. “One of my idols was James Dean. I never felt that I became an actor, I was an actor. I had a sense that I knew how to do what they were doing up on the screen. I couldn’t articulate it. I finished high school and left almost immediately for New York.”

Sheen made his acting debut in 1956. Some of his most famous works include Badlands, Apocalypse Now and Wall Street, as well as The West Wing and Murphy B

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