
Evergreen do-gooder Sting (above) will be gracing Hong Kong with his presence next month. Born Gordon Sumner, the British eco-activist got his moniker from a black and yellow striped shirt he wore on stage early in his career (he looked like a wasp; geddit?). The philanthropic former frontman of The Police owns several luxury properties, including an Elizabethan manor house on 60 acres of southern England, a 600-acre estate in Tuscany, Italy, and a Malibu beach house bought from one Larry Hagman …
Hagman bears little resemblance to the evil Texan oil billionaire J.R. Ewing, whom he plays in the recently revived 1980s soap opera Dallas and is, in fact, a fan of substance abuse. The former heavy drinker and LSD enthusiast has requested his ashes be scattered "over a field and have marijuana and wheat planted and harvest it in a couple of years and then have a big marijuana cake … People eat a little of Larry [sic]." In 1996, he offered to front the rehab costs for his drug-addled friend Robert Downey Jr …
Downey's 10 years of sobriety are every bit as remarkable as his talent as an actor, when you consider he was introduced to drugs at the age of six by his father, an independent filmmaker and addict. "It was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how," Downey Jr says. The pinnacle of his career before his 1990s spiral came when he received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of British silent film genius Charlie Chaplin …