Six degrees of separation from Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew , Singapore’s founding father, will be given a state funeral today, following a week of mourning. During the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942 to 1945, Lee learnt to speak Japanese and worked as a translator. He narrowly escaped dying in the Sook Ching massacre by making an excuse not to board a Japanese truck. The Chinese men onboard were taken to a beach and shot. Later, as the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee joined the International Council, which was founded by David Rockefeller …

The 99-year-old American banker and philanthropist is the grandson of John Davison Rockefeller Snr, who became the world’s first billionaire, in 1916. David Rockefeller, who served in the United States Army in North Africa and France during the second world war, was offered the positions of US secretary of the treasury and Federal Reserve chairman by American president Jimmy Carter, both of which he declined. In the 1950s, when a future secretary of the treasury for Richard Nixon was honoured at the University of Chicago – founded in 1890 by Rockefeller Snr – David Rockefeller flew in for the ceremony. That man was George Shultz …

Born in 1920, American economist Shultz was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. After his first wife, Helena Maria O’Brien, died in 1995, Shultz married flamboyant socialite and Chief of Protocol for California Charlotte Mailliard Swig. In 2003, Shultz was named co-chair, with Warren Buffet, of the Californian Economic Recovery Council, a group which advised gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger …

The 67-year-old actor-turned-politician was born in the sleepy village of Thal, in Austria. While undertaking national service, Arnie went awol to attend a body-building competition, earning him a week in jail on his return. Aged 21, “the best built man in Europe” moved to the US, where he became the world’s top bodybuilder. Before becoming the 38th governor of California in 2003, Schwarzenegger was an action-film superstar, appearing in movies such as Last Action Hero, which featured a guest performance by Ian McKellen …

Best known for playing Gandalf the wizard in the Hollywood adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lords of the Rings, McKellen was born in Lancashire, northern England, just a few months before the start of the second world war. “Only after peace resumed … did I realise that war wasn’t normal,” he later reflected. McKellen says he signed onto the X-Men film franchise in 1999 because, as an openly homosexual man, he could relate to the central theme of mutants being shunned by humans and prevented from living in peace. In the films, McKellen plays supervillain Magneto …