Brace yourself for a wave of Hollywood star veterans’ biographies/memoirs. Fans will rejoice, skeptics will cringe.

But such is the power of the genre: it is my (the author’s) version, my final word. It may not be the absolute truth – it can never be (see “What’s your life story” and “Memoirs are made of these?”) but it is my (the author’s) version of it.

“Biography is merely one view of a life that can never be pinned down,” said Hermoine Lee, Goldsmith’s Professor of English at Oxford University.

The author of acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton is wary of distilling one’s life into one event – suicide for example, in the case of Woolf – or an illness. It would simply be too simplistic.

That’s pretty much a common sense. But in an age of information overload and when simplicity is prized above complications, it is not difficult to see how one’s life can be simply equated to one event.

For example: Lee Kuan Yew is almost crystallised in “that” pivotal news footage when he announced the separation of Singapore from Malaysia on 9 August 1965. Mao Zedong has been memoralised in his proclamation on Tiananmen Square in 1949 that the Chinese people has stood up. Or George Bush erroneously proclaiming on board a US battleship that the mission in Iraq is accomplished five years ago.

More trivia examples include how Sarah Jessica Parker is often synonymous with Sex and The City, or Tom Cruise with Top Gun and Mission Impossible.

There are plenty more such examples. What are your top three?