Han Suyin, also known by her pen name Elizabeth Comber, was an author, historian, doctor and general overachiever, who died two years ago today. Born in 1917 in Henan province to a Hakka father and Flemish mother, she wrote in English and French on modern China, showing strong support for the communist revolution. In 1949, she began practising at Hong Kong’s Queen Mary Hospital and started the affair that inspired her famous autobiographical novel A Many-Splendoured Thing. Han’s lover was the married journalist Ian Morrison …
Based in Singapore, but a regular at Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Morrison was a war reporter for London’s The Times newspaper, covering the Pacific Front in the second world war and later the Korean war, where he was one of the conflict’s first journalist casualties. His name features on a plaque hanging in the FCC which commemorates members killed in the line of duty. Born in Beijing to Australian parents, he later attended Winchester College, in England, a public school established in 1382 which boasts alumni as eclectic as a 14th-century archbishop of Canterbury and the 20th-century American screen writer and film director Joss Whedon …
Whedon’s father and grandfather were also successful screenwriters, but as a child he was strictly forbidden from watching television – a rule enforced by his mother after his parents divorced when he was eight. Whedon made his name creating fantasy TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and today his work attracts a cultlike following. In 2012, he wrote the screenplay for the third-highest grossing film of all time, The Avengers. He also penned some of the dialogue for last year’s blockbuster Thor: The Dark World, based on a comic about the Norse god of thunder …
Hammer-wielding Thor is a deity associated with all the big hitters: thunder, lightning, oak trees, fertility and, oh yeah, the protection of mankind. For the Hollywood movie, the blonde-haired, blue eyed Australian actor Chris Hemsworth was cast to portray the god who defeated evil elves planning on sinking the universe into darkness. The film’s acclaimed set design was described by one critic as looking like a city created by the designer of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, Frank Gehry …
The Canadian-born Pritzker Prize-winning architect is known for his striking designs: the flowing, irregular curves clad in glass, titanium and limestone of Bilbao’s Guggenheim are now iconic. In downtown Sydney, Gehry’s crushed brick “paper bag” structure will soon be the University of Technology’s new business school. Gehry also worked on renovating the Norton Simon Museum in the American city he now calls home, Los Angeles. For this project, he collaborated with retired Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Jones …
A screen siren from Hollywood’s golden years, in 1971, Jones, aged 52, married her third husband: multimillionaire art collector and philanthropist Norton Simon, whose collection fills the gallery bearing his name. Jones was born in 1919 and got her big break in what she thought was a flunked audition with legendary producer David O. Selznick. Not only did Selznick sign her up, he later married her (once she had divorced her first husband, TV actor Robert Walker), and their union lasted until his death, in 1965. Jones starred in classic films such as Madame Bovary and Love is a Many- Splendoured Thing, in which she played a Hong Kong doctor who falls in love with a war correspondent. The doctor was Han Suyin.
