Six degrees of separation from Dan Reynolds
Mary Hui
Dan Reynolds is due to perform with his American alternative rock group, Imagine Dragons, at the AsiaWorld-Expo next Sunday. The band first came to Hong Kong last year for a free concert to mark the world premiere of Transformers 4, for which they wrote the theme song, Battle Cry. Raised a Mormon, Reynolds dropped out of Brigham Young University, in Utah, to form the band. Another noted ex-student of the university is the author of the Twilight vampire romance series, Stephenie Meyer …
While a 21-year-old undergraduate, Meyer married an accountant she had met at church when she was four. She began writing after having a vivid dream about a fledgling relationship between a girl and a loving but blood-thirsty vampire. Two years later, she published the first book of her four-part Twilight series, which has since sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into 37 languages. Her male protagonist, Edward, was partly inspired by the character Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, the 19thcentury novel by Jane Austen …
Born in a tiny southern English village, in 1775, Austen will be the new face of the British £10 note, replacing naturalist Charles Darwin in 2017. Although her works dealt with love and courtship, Austen never married; she did, however, end an engagement with a wealthy fiancé one day after having accepted the offer. Recently, her work has found favour with a senior leader in the Communist Party, who is spearheading a nationwide graft-busting campaign and lists Sense and Sensibility as his favourite Austen novel. His name is Wang Qishan …
Having taken over from the disgraced mayor of Beijing in 2003, at the peak of the Sars crisis, the “chain-smoking, straight-talking former historian” was then promoted to vice-premier of the State Council in 2008. Dubbed “China’s anti-corruption tsar” by the Financial Times newspaper, Wang is a big fan of the popular Netflix TV series House of Cards, which he “repeatedly [brings] up” during meetings with party officials, according to the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Media. The series centres on a ruthless American politician, played by Kevin Spacey …
Spacey is actually the two-time Academy Award winner’s middle name: Fowler is the last name on his birth certificate. His older brother, Randy Fowler, is a Rod Stewart impersonator who lives in Idaho and sold family secrets to the Mail on Sunday newspaper, including damning details about their father. In 2003, Spacey was named artistic director of the legendary Old Vic Theatre, in London, which dates back to 1818. The appointment was announced by the theatre’s chairman, Elton John …
The singer-songwriter, who founded the Elton John Aids Foundation, in 2012 said at a conference in Washington, “I should have contracted HIV in the 1980s and died in the 1990s … Every day I wonder, ‘How did I survive?’” His 1997 single Candle in the Wind spent 14 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 list and has been awarded diamond status by the Recording Industry Association of America. Also sharing this accolade is Radioactive, which spent 87 weeks on Billboard charts – a record. On vocals for that song was Dan Reynolds.
