Six degrees of separation from Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet

Gary Kemp is one of the five London lads starring in Spandau Ballet: The Movie – Soul Boys of The Western World, showing at the AMC Theatre in Pacific Place today. The documentary charts the rise and fall of the new wave 1980s pop group, from their New Romantic roots to their acrimonious split in 1990. (The band reunited in 2009). The film will be followed by “Live From The Royal Albert Hall” – a question and answer session at the London landmark, with band members and director George Hencken, rounded off by a live performance. Kemp, who was the group’s chief songwriter, also co-wrote the musical A Terrible Beauty, based on the life of William Butler Yeats …

Born in 1865, the Irish poet won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Yeats also had a lifelong interest in mysticism and occultism and, in 1911, he joined the Ghost Club, a paranormal research organisation (other famous members of the group included Charles Dickens and Sigmund Freud). In 1919, Yeats penned The Second Coming, a phrase from which was used as the title for the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe … The Nigerian novelist, poet, professor and critic, born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in 1930, is considered the father of modern African literature. After a car accident in Lagos in 1990 left the Igbo chieftain wheelchair-bound, he moved to the United States where, in 2009, he became a professor at Brown University. An outspoken academic, in 1975, Achebe gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, titled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, in which he asserted that the famous novel dehumanised Africans. The author of the book in question was, of course, Joseph Conrad …

The writer was, among other things, a gambler and, in 1878, up to his ears in debt, a 20-year-old Conrad tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The bullet missed his heart and he lived for the next 46 years. The spaceship in the Ridley Scott film Alien is named Nostromo after Conrad’s classic 1904 novel of the same name. Many of his works have been adapted into films, including The Secret Agent, which was adapted into a 1996 movie starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gerard Depardieu …

The 66-year-old French actor and filmmaker also owns a vineyard – handy for someone who claims to drink “12, 13, 14 bottles” of wine a day. In 2010, in St Petersburg, Russia, Depardieu – who claims to own seven passports, including a Russian one – was one of a handful of Hollywood stars to witness Vladimir Putin sing a cringeworthy version of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll hit Blueberry Hill. Other celebs at the charity event included actors Goldie Hawn, Mickey Rourke and Kevin Costner …

Before hitting the big time, the winner of two Oscars and three Golden Globes worked as a bus driver, taking everyday folk on tours of Hollywood stars’ homes. Costner has since starred in box office smashes including The Untouchables and JFK. But perhaps his most memorable role was in the 1992 romantic thriller The Bodyguard, also starring the late Whitney Houston and British musician and actor Gary Kemp.