Golden Globes 2026: What Dakota Fanning Promised Elle Fanning Before ‘The Nightingale’
Will the real Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning please stand up?
While the famous siblings have been known as Dakota and Elle in Hollywood for years, those are actually their middle names. So, who are the All Her Fault and The Neon Demon actresses really?
They were born Hannah Dakota Fanning and Mary Elle Fanning.
But as Elle previously explained, the sisters never used their first names growing up, even before they became famous.
“My mom goes by her middle name, and my sister goes by her middle name. Her first name is Hannah,” the 27-year-old shared with Glamour in 2016. “It’s possibly a Southern thing, I don’t know. But since my mom goes by her middle name, we go by our middle names too.”
However, Elle’s decision not to go by Mary did cause some confusion while she was growing up.
“It was awkward in school when they were calling roll call,” she recalled, “because they’d go, ‘Mary? Mary?’ Kids would be like, ‘There’s no Mary here.’ I’d awkwardly raise my hand, like, ‘Uh, it’s me.’”