A few days ago I was mistaken for film composer John Altman by jazz bassist/music educator Gary Crosby, when I greeted him and wished him happy 70th birthday.
This is not the first time it’s happened. The third in recent years, in fact.
There is indeed a resemblance, as can be seen in the photo in the first comment.
Does anyone else here have a double? Who is your evil twin?
I was not especially pleased when a cab driver once said to me that I looked like Gordon Brown.
Cruel cabby.
Click to see both of us.
When I was much, much younger (and slimmer) I apparently looked like Lofty from Eastenders.
Not any more I don’t.
Bob Harris
(Moreso when you had your beard)
Am I his evil twin, or is he mine?
No photos to prove it but in the 80s I was so much like Paul Young I used to get stopped for autographs on a regular basis now I look more like Tinker off Lovejoy
In 1985 I was once followed around the London Virgin Megastore by a Japanese man who insisted I sign his Feargal Sharkey album. There’s a vague resemblence, but I was 15 at the time, and the TKHM was 27.
In fairness, if I’d met Tinker from Lovejoy (when he was still with us), I’d have asked him for an autograph. I’d probably have asked him to sign it ‘Clive’, too.
A friend of mine did indeed once ask Tinker from Lovejoy for his autograph. He was told to piss off.
To be fair to Tinker, my friend may have been quite obnoxious during this encounter.
So he didn’t GIVE a tinker’s cuss – he received one!
I have been likened to Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame and Robin Williams: neither one of them is stunningly good looking.
Have been likened to Nicholas Hytner, ex-director of the National Theatre, from a certain angle. He’s taller than me, but a lot of people are.
I really hate to show off but I’ve had Hugh Grant, Hugh Laurie and Joe Strummer. These days it’s a bit more Michael Stipe or Frederik Reinfeldt (ex prime minister of Sweden), though I have a bit more hair than the latter individual.
Robin Williams was often mistaken for me and I was often mistaken for Mork
Funny how getting to know someone in the virtual world can build up a false image. I always pictured you more as a Danny DeVito type.
In my student days, I used a local launderette. The first time I entered, one of the ladies exclaimed “Ooh, I thought it was Superman coming in!”*
She wasn’t so keen when I started to strip off my trunks and cape…**
*This bit is true
**This bit…not so much.
‘Oi! There’s a phone box on the corner for that sorry of shenanigans!’
I was in the front row of a Beatles tribute band concert a couple of years ago when one of the band pointed at me from the stage and said, “Aye, Aye, Eric Clapton’s in tonight”. No mention of a resemblance before that. Unfortunately I can’t play the guitar.
Did the mock George offer you outside for a fight?
Luckily no. He was almost as old as I was.
70s Jesus and George Harrison.
80s Mike Rutherford
90s one of The Fabulous Salami Brothers.
00s Pete Townshend
10s no one in particular
20s Harry Kane’s father, by a taxi driver in Tunisia.
Many many years ago a very drunken man in a Rotherham nightclub gents insisted that I was Martin Fry and wouldn’t let me go until I’d given him my autograph – I sometimes wonder if he still has the piece of paper I scribbled something illegible on.
I’ve got one of those faces:
early to mid 1970s: Roland Browning
1979: Richard Dreyfuss
1981: Joey Ramone
1985: Elvis Costello
1994: Engelbert Humperdink
2010s: Robert Winston
2020s: Uncle Monty
Frank Bello from Anthrax, in my youger fatter face days.
Now bespectacled and thinner, Graham Coxon.
Early 70’s : Joe 90, Elton John
80’s : Someone Dave Pegg was at school with
Now (as in, once) : Steve Earle
I was once stuck in a very long and very slow traffic jam on the M1 next to a vanload of rather uncouth types who were keen to point out my resemblance to Jeremy from BBC fly on the wall show Airport.
I have also been mistaken for Spanish film director Alex de la Iglesia and used to be told I looked like LOTR helmer Peter Jackson quite regularly too.
Many (many, many) years ago I was told I had a passing resemblance to Hugh Grant. Now I look like Hugh Grant’s picture in the attic. While he continues to look relatively youthful someone seems to have let all the air out of my face.
Jo Whiley AND Chesney Hawkes.
Cuh!
I am Al Murray’s Pub Landlord.
I delayed posting earlier, as I was waiting patiently for the first comment. It didn’t come.
Here am I when I first came to Germany
And here’s is some German called Bosse, singing and dancing as awkwardly as I used to, and wearing the same clothes and hat as I used to. I can’t watch it, it freaks me out.
May I be the first to point out that you also bore a strong resemblance to Rowland Rivron.
I think you may – nobody has ever said that before.
Though I can see some resemblance, his photos on Google Images call to mind variously Piers Morgan, Richard Desmond and Johnny Vegas, which is troubling.
At the Eiffel Tower in summer 1985 I was surrounded by around 20 teenage American girls who insisted that they had their photo taken with me as they thought I looked like “the guy from Tears for Fears”, (Curt rather than Roland). On the same trip in Munich I was accosted by some locals in a restaurant who seemed to think they knew me and thought I was trying to trick them when I said I spoke no German.
In Dublin in the 80s there was apparently a bus conductor that looked so much like me that people who knew me really well were convinced it was me. We never crossed paths.
In my 20s I had a resemblance at one stage to the main character in Eraserhead and I used to wear a t-shirt with his image gifted to me by a girlfriend.
A lad I knew from secondary school who always addressed me as Willy, asked me around 10 years later when we used to see one another around “what’s your real name?” I said Bill or William and asked what he meant. He explained that I was known as Willy Olsen from Little House on the Prairie to his class in school and he’d never bothered to see what my name actually was.
used to be told i looked like Charlie Sheen then a few years ago I was mistaken for Jack Black whilst in Vegas
I was told by a work colleague in the early 2000s that I resembled a ‘fat Keifer Sutherland’.
Which begs the question: does Keifer Sutherland get told he looks like a thin @dkhbrit?
When I was about 16/17 I got Bob Geldof a few times. This once happened in a group setting, in a pub, and one of the group said “yeah, but Geldof doesn’t have acne!”. Everyone laughed, including me but I was wounded, Terence, wounded.
During the early 80s during my tragic Psychobilly phase I was constantly told that I resembled Rowan Atkinson’s gormless first incarnation of Black Adder. Having a jet black flat top hairstyle didn’t help as it looked like that ridiculous medieval hat he wore every episode.
I don’t look like anyone. However twice in my life, work colleagues have said ‘oh! You look like…’ some one I’ve never heard of before or since. Both times it been a different portly, bearded American actor.
I’ve never seen the likeness. I mean, I’m not an American actor.
Way back when, a younger Barry from Eastenders.
Nowadays, based on my passport photos and the reactions from Immigration people, I am ‘Russian terrorist du jour”
On a building refurbishment job I worked on in 1995, there was a grumpy, jobsworth security guard on duty every day who, sadly for him, looked the spitting image of Fred West.
We were merciless.
I was mobbed on a cross-channel ferry by French schoolgirls because of my alleged resemblance to John Lennon.
Also, about the same time, the office cleaning lady decided I looked like Peter Sellers, and greeted me thereafter with a stentorian ‘Wotcher Pete’.
Twenty years ago or so, every time I was waiting for a bus at a particular place in the city, I’d be greeted by someone as if they knew me, asking me if I’d stopped working at a particular store nearby – one I’d never worked in. When I told them that and that they were mistaking me for someone else, they never believed me. I had a few really weird encounters, with multiple persons at different times.
And whenever I walked into that shop, the staff would do a double take and look at me in a weird way (that made me suspect that my doppelganger had been fired from the shop for some bad stuff…)
Never did run into my double, so can’t say if I think we looked alike, but the way some people insisted that I was lying when I said it wasn’t me…must have been a secret twin!
I got told last week that I look like Mark Chapman. It was then elaborated that it was the Match of the Day Mark Chapman rather than the Beatle murdering one. Which was a relief.
As Half Man, Half Biscuit memorably sang…
“I’m off to see the Bootleg Beatles as the Bootleg Mark Chapman.”
Many years ago, a young lady of the female persuasion told me I looked like James Dean. A few years ago I was arguing with a female friend that a lot of women seem to think men are snowflakes that need to be flattered and put forward this remark as exhibit A. She replied “but you do”.
I don’t.
Had you recently been in a road accident?
Actually, yes! But not a fatal one..
1980s – Jim Kerr / Bruce Willis (when all 3 of us still had hair)
2000s – Harry Hill (when I wore a white shirt & glasses. Hair gone)
Now – Uncle Fester (total slap head)
Patrick Troughton / Iggy Pop
Matthew Corbett / Brian Murphy (RIP) / Richard Thompson