Six degrees
Kylie Knott
Miriam Yeung Chin-wah, actress and Canto-pop star, performs today at the Hong Kong International Races in Sha Tin. A nurse at the Princess Margaret Hospital in a previous life, Yeung has wowed crowds in the city for years, including during a 2008 performance at the opening of a Hong Kong Disneyland attraction, when she sang the Cantonese version of It’s a Small World (After All). The Sherman Brothers (Americans Richard and Robert) wrote the song as a message of peace in the wake of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a pivotal point of the cold war when nuclear tensions escalated due to the Soviet Union’s alliance with Fidel Castro …
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz served as prime minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. He claims to have survived more than 600 attempts on his life (mainly masterminded by the CIA), which have come in the form of poison pills, a toxic cigar and powder to make his beard fall out, thus undermining his popularity. One of Castro’s propaganda tools was a cow called Ubre Blanca (“White Udder”), which holds the Guinness World record for the highest milk yield by a cow in one day (110 litres). Castro claimed its prodigious milk output was evidence of communism’s superior breeding skills. The cigar-chomping dictator has been the subject of many films, including 2002’s Fidel, which co-starred Gael García Bernal …
The 36-year-old Mexican actor played Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in that film and is known for his political activism (he joined the anti-World Trade Organisation protests in Hong Kong in 2005). Garcia Bernal has acted in hits such as Amores Perros and The Motorcycle Diaries as well as the 2010 romantic drama Letters to Juliet, with Amanda Seyfried. The film was inspired by the 2006 non-fiction book of the same name, which chronicled the phenomenon in the Italian city of Verona of writing letters to Juliet, the heroine created by William Shakespeare …
The 1564-born poet and playwright, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, introduced nearly 3,000 words to his native language. Almost 400 years after his death, there are about 90 million pages referring to him on Google. One of his darkest and most powerful works is Macbeth, which was transported from 11th-century Scotland to 16th-century Japan in the 1957 hit Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood), directed by Akira Kurosawa …
Born in 1910, the Japanese filmmaker was a painter before breaking into the movie business (his film storyboards were full-scale paintings). In 1989, Kurosawa’s 1954 film, Seven Samurai, got a Hong Kong facelift in Seven Warriors. Like its inspiration, the Hong Kong version revolved around seven warriors defending a village from bandits, one of whom is played by actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai …
Dubbed “Little Tony” to distinguish him from fellow actor Tony Leung Ka-fai (“Big Tony”), Leung Chiu-wai is one of Hong Kong’s most successful stars. In 2012, a black and white photo of him titled “Tony Leung in Beijing”, taken by Singaporean Dominic Khoo, sold for S$150,000 (HK$878,000), making it one of the city-state’s most expensive art pieces that year. Leung has appeared in hit films such as Happy Together and Hero and, in 2003, he was seen in the romcom, My Lucky Star, with Miriam Yeung.
