German names consist of one or several Vornamen (forenames) and a Nachname (Familienname, family name). The Vorname is usually gender-specific.

The Vorname (in English forename) is given to a child by the parents shortly after birth but not in all cases. It is not uncommon to give a child several Vornamen (forenames). Usually, one of them is meant to be normally used and called the Rufname (call name). This is often underlined on official documents, as it is sometimes the second or third name in a list, even though it is the person's main name.

Most surnames or family names (Nachnamen) consist of only one word. Titles of former aristocrats (like Graf for "Count") have become parts of the Nachname in Germany, giving longer names of several words, usually including the nobiliary particle von (meaning "of") or zu (meaning "to", sometimes "at"), often von und zu are also found together (meaning "of and to/at"). The legal rules for these names are the same as those for other Nachnamen, which gives rise to a number of cases where people legally bear such names but are not recognized by the associations of formerly noble families in Germany, which continue to apply the old rules of the German Empire in their publications. Most of these cases come about when a woman of noble descent marries a man with no title, and the two adopt the woman's name as their common Nachname, which was impossible under imperial law.

Terence Hill (born Mario Girotti; 29 March 1939) is an Italian actor. He is best known for starring in multiple action and western films (so-called spaghetti westerns) together with his longtime film partner Bud Spencer.

Hill was born in Venice, Italy. His mother was German, his father an Italian chemist. As a child, he lived in the small town of Lommatzsch, Germany from 1943 to 1945 during World War II, surviving the Dresden Bombing. After being discovered by Italian filmmaker Dino Risi for Vacanze col Gangster (Holiday with the Gangster, 1951) at an early age of 12, he had, after 27 movies in Italy (including Gli sbandati), a major film role in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963). In 1964, he returned to Germany and there, appeared in a series of Heimatfilmen, adventure and western films, made after novels by German author Karl May. In 1967, he returned to Italy to act in God Forgives... I Don't! (Dio perdona... Io no!, 1968). He changed his name to Terence Hill in the same year. The name was made up, as a publicity stunt, by the film producers; he had to choose from a list of twenty names and picked the one with his mother's initials. In a Q&A, he dismissed as a journalist's invention the rumour that it might have been taken from the Roman playwright Terence and his wife's surname (his wife was Lori Zwicklbauer; she later took her husband's surname).