Six degrees

Snoop Dogg was in town recently, entertaining Hong Kong's hippest and most happening at Dragon-i. The former gangster, porn director and pimp (below) admits to being a fan of the world's longest-running soap opera, Coronation Street, and asked for a cameo role in the story of everyday British folk, but was turned down. One of his successful overseas ventures saw him become the first mainstream American artist to perform on a Bollywood soundtrack. The movie in question was Singh is Kinng, starring Akshay Kumar ...

Kumar taught martial arts until one of his students secured him a one-off job as a model. Upon discovering he could earn 5,000 rupees for two hours of staring wistfully into a camera, compared with his 4,000-rupee monthly salary as a teacher, he promptly left the classroom behind. The host of India's Fear Factor reality show worked as a stunt actor and - for his willingness to take on extremely dangerous jobs - earned the nickname 'the Indian Jackie Chan' ...

Chan ranked last in a Reader's Digest survey of Hong Kong's 80 most-trusted public figures last year. Perhaps the respondents were still reeling from comments Chan made in 2009, when he said, 'Chinese people need to be controlled'. Or maybe they took exception to the time an inebriated Chan jumped on stage at a Jonathan Lee concert slurring barely coherent curses at an ungrateful audience. Nonetheless, his place on the Avenue of Stars is next to that of seminal director John Woo Yu-sum ...

Woo has inspired filmmakers around the world with his use of slow motion to underscore the drama in movies such as A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled. Woo knows a thing or two about hardship: his impoverished family were left homeless by the fire that ripped through the Shek Kip Mei slums in 1953. Woo emigrated to America in 1993 and, seven years later, was directing the blockbuster Mission Impossible II, part of a franchise that launched the producing career of Tom Cruise ...