Famous Chessplayers

There are a lot of blogs and articles on the internet listing famous people who played chess--famous for something other than playing chess, I mean. Unfortunately many of them provide little to no actual information, either in terms of sources or specifics as far as how much such famous people played and how good they were. Some of them give no more than a name. I thought I'd delve slightly more deeply into the topic, and scour the internet (and occasionally other places; apparently there are these things called "books" that often have interesting information) to find some of the better-supported stuff, which I will brazenly repeat as though I actually did some serious research.

Once I started I realized it was going to be a bigger project than I thought, so I decided to break it up into smaller more manageable chunks. I'm going to divide it up into several entries sorted by the main profession of the famous person--athletes in one installment, say, followed by statesmen, soldiers and politicians in another. This first installment will be the Hollywood edition, which will also include other actors, stage performers and filmmakers (but not people who are primarily musicians or singers; they'll get their own category).

As with many of the other categories, there are a lot of actors and other Hollywood types who are known to have played chess at least a little bit, but this is unremarkable. Chess is probably the most popular board game in the world and many, many people have played it a few times without taking it seriously enough for anyone to consider them chessplayers. I've played bridge a couple of times but no one would consider me a bridge player. Apparently there is, or was, a Bel Air Chess Club that for a time attracted a number of well-known actors and actresses, but for all I know they just showed up once or twice and played a game or two for publicity purposes. Similarly the fact that a celebrity mentioned chess in some interview, without more, doesn't really make much of an impression on me. I needed more than that before I would put them on my list.

Having said all of that, there are definitely some famous Hollywood people who were serious chessplayers.

John Wayne (1907-1979)

"The Duke," famous for playing cowboys, soldiers and other macho men in a Hollywood movie career stretching over a span of 50 years. Wayne's penchant for playing chess is well documented; there are many photographs of him playing on film sets with other actors and crew members, and it's mentioned in many of his biographies. He also played bridge and other card games. What we don't know is how good he was. Apparently he beat most of his opponents, but many of them presumably did not take the game as seriously as he did. He played mostly with people he associated with as an actor and did not seek out strong opponents he did not know. He did not play in official tournaments, so we'll probably never know how good he really was.

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

Director, producer and screenwriter, considered among the greatest filmmakers of all time. His films include Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket among many others. In the early 1950s Kubrick made a living for a short time as a chess hustler in Washington Square Park in New York. He claimed to have made about three dollars a day, "which goes a long way if all you buy is food" according to Kubrick in a 1966 article in the New Yorker. Kubrick played chess on his film sets with many of his actors and crew, including George C. Scott, and there are scenes featuring chess in many of his films. His entry at Wikipedia claims that he was a member of the United States Chess Federation, but if so he either registered under a different name or played no rated games after 1990 as nothing turned up in a player search under his name. Apparently he played at the Marshall Chess Club in New York, and several people who claimed to have played against him there estimated his USCF rating at around 1800-2000.

Stephen Fry (b. 1957)

I could have considered Fry as a writer rather than an actor. Cambridge educated, Fry seems to know everything about everything and is fascinated by all of it, including chess. He's best known for television comedy in Great Britain but is also an accomplished writer including several memoirs where he mentions chess numerous times. One of his best friends when he was at university, Kim Harris, was a master-level player and Fry marveled at Harris's ability to play blindfold. From the way Fry writes about Harris's ability we can be fairly certain that Fry himself was quite a bit weaker, but unfortunately for all Fry writes about chess he reveals little about his own ability at the game. As far as I know the only public game Fry has played was as a celebrity opponent for Matthew Sadler in a simultaneous exhibition in 1988, the result of which was not given so I assume that Fry lost.

Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957)

Bogart, an all-time Hollywood A-list actor who starred in such classics as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The African Queen and The Caine Mutiny among others is also Hollywood's best-known chessplayer as well as possibly the strongest. Like Kubrick, Bogart played chess on the street for money during hard times before he became a big star, and was able to support himself at 50 cents to a dollar a game. He was a member of the United States Chess Federation and was very active in the chess community; he appeared on the cover of Chess Life in 1945. He was without doubt a very strong player; he would crush other actors and crew on set and once played Sammy Reshevsky at a simultaneous exhibition and held Reshevsky to a draw. He played George Koltanowski but lost in 41 moves (Koltanowski was blindfolded). One of the early scenes in Casablanca featuring Rick (Bogart) analyzing over a chessboard was added at Bogart's insistence and the position was supposed to have been taken from a correspondence game Bogart was playing at the time, but the story is that the pieces were accidentally knocked over and reassembled by crew members in a random position before filming began. One of Bogart's biographies claimed that among other actors Bogart was only bested by Paul Henreid (1908-1992) who played Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (Henreid's Wikipedia entry says nothing about him playing chess). It's fairly certain that Bogart was at least USCF 2000 Elo.

Rainn Wilson (b. 1966)

Best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on the popular television series The Office (American version), Wilson has played (as of February 2021) over 1500 games on Chess.com and at that time his Chess.com rating at blitz was just a bit under 1200 and his Rapid rating in the 1300s. He participated in the online celebrity chess tournament Pogchamps 3 in 2021, finishing second to French streamer Sardoche. In 2014 he played against Magnus Carlsen in a friendly online game; Wilson noted that he considered himself pretty good at chess but also pretty good at tennis and had as much chance of beating Carlsen at chess as he had of beating Roger Federer at tennis.

Peter Falk (1927-2011)

American actor best known for playing the lead role in the long-running television detective series Columbo. Falk's interest in chess was well-known and photographs of him at tournaments appeared in Chess Life and Review in 1972 and Chess Life in 1983 when he was on the December cover with Yasser Seirawan and Larry Christiansen and another photo in the same issue shows him talking to Viktor Korchnoi. An episode of Columbo in the early 1970s featured a plot in which a top-level chessplayer murders his opponent. Unfortunately much of the information on the internet is the same few facts in a hundred different places and those facts do not include how strong a player Falk was. Someone claimed that they looked him up on the USCF player list and that he had a rating around 1400, but a contemporary search turned up no member with that name.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947)

The bodybuilder, Governor of California and especially action movie star (his most famous role was as The Terminator) has been a friend to the game for a number of years. He says he learned the game from his father at age 8 and played every day. Later he played with friends from the gym when he first came to America from Austria. Photographs exist of Schwarzenegger playing chess as early as the 1970s, and comedian Bill Hader, who was his personal assistant for the movie Collateral Damage, said he played chess during down time and it became a problem because he got so absorbed in his games that he didn't want to resume filming. In more recent years his association with chess has been more overt; he played a friendly game against Garry Kasparov in 2002 and during the COVID shutdown tweeted a photograph of him playing at home (with a beautiful chess set and board) against a pet donkey named Lulu. In 2015 he talked about chess as a guest on Howard Stern's radio show. He created a series of competitions called the Arnold Classic that is mostly focused on bodybuilding and fitness but has also has a chess competition in some of its iterations. He tweeted several pictures of a friendly game against former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger is not known to have ever participated in any official chess competitions or against opponents of known strength (the game against Kasparov was not a serious game) so we don't know if he is a particularly strong player.

Woody Harrelson (b. 1961)

Harrelson gained fame (and an Emmy award) as bartender Woody Boyd on the long-running television series Cheers before starting a successful career in movies. His interest in chess was revealed when he showed up to watch a game between Judit Polgar and Alexei Shirov in 1999 in Prague that had been arranged by Garry Kasparov. Somehow Harrelson got Kasparov to agree to play a game with him, and eventually drew the game after getting assistance from two other grandmasters who were present. He spoke about chess in a 2007 interview with NBCsports.com and in 2013 said he played a number of times against Marlon Brando, who would occasionally ask to take back moves. In later years Harrelson played the ceremonial first move at two of Magnus Carlsen's world championship matches in 2016 and 2018 and at the Grand Chess Tour finals in 2019. Harrelson's interest in chess is pretty well established, but as with many other Hollywood chessplayers his strength is a mystery.

Claude Akins (1926-1994)

Akins was a longtime Hollywood character actor, appearing in numerous films and television series from 1951 to 1992, including many westerns. His most famous role was as Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo on the television series B.J. and the Bear in the 1970s. He was also in several movies with John Wayne including Rio Bravo in 1959. Akins supposedly played in a blitz tournament organized by Walter Browne and was a spectator at the 1988 World Action Chess Championship in Mexico. There was a photo of him in Chess Life in 1988 playing against a regular opponent, actor William Windom. Like many other chessplaying actors he played on set, including while wearing a gorilla costume on the set of Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other Hollywood personalities who supposedly play chess; you can find them with a quick internet search. I didn't include them here either because the information I could find didn't seem very reliable, or because even if it was true I wasn't sure the interest in chess was sustained over a long enough time period to rate inclusion in this list. I'm confident that the people I chose to list here deserve to be called chessplayers, whether they were strong players or not. In most cases we just don't know.

The strongest Hollywood chessplayer may have been Paul Henreid, who apparently bested Humphrey Bogart regularly. I guess I could have included him in the list, since he was a Hollywood actor, but the problem is that he was so obscure that I don't consider him to be famous. Before working on this blog entry I had never heard of him. Of the people who made the list, the strongest players are Bogart and Stanley Kubrick. Even though we don't know the strength of most of the others, my sense is that if they were better than those two we would know.