Several amateur chess players have been noted in other endeavors, while their lives and work have been influenced by the game of chess.
Woody Allen
The film comedian and occasional player taught his adopted son Moses Farrow the game; authored a comical epistolary short story titled "The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers" involving a chess game played via mail. The two protagonists disagree on the correct position due to alleged lost exchange. Both eventually claim victory. Humphrey Bogart Prior to his acting career, Bogart hustled players for dimes and quarters, playing in New York parks and at Coney Island. Frank Kelly Rich, on Drunkard.com, writes that “When his meager wages were exhausted, he’d play chess against all comers in arcades for a dollar a match (he was a brilliant player) to fund his outings.” Mike Doyle, on Chess.com, writes that “Before he made any money from acting, he would hustle players for dimes and quarters, playing in New York parks and at Coney Island.” The chess scenes in Casablanca had not been in the original script, but were put in at his insistence. A chess position from one of his correspondence games appears in the movie, although the image is blurred. He achieved a draw in a simultaneous exhibition given in 1955 at Beverly Hills by the famous chess Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky and also played against George Koltanowski in San Francisco in 1952 (Koltanowski played blindfolded but still won in 41 moves). Bogart was a United States Chess Federation tournament director and active in the California State Chess Association, and a frequent visitor to the Hollywood chess club. The cover of the June–July 1945 issue of Chess Review showed Bogart playing with Charles Boyer, as Lauren Bacall (who also played) looks on. In June 1945, in an interview in the magazine Silver Screen, when asked what things in life mattered most to him, he replied that chess was one of his main interests. He added that he played chess almost daily, especially between film shootings. Bogart remained an avid player throughout his life. Lewis Carroll The mathematician and fantasy author used chess as a central device in his 1871 book Through the Looking Glass. Most of the characters are chess pieces participating in a game on a giant board in which each square is about one square mile in size. Carroll also composed occasional chess problems. Charlie Chaplin The silent screen comedian devoted two pages of his autobiography to playing chess, noting his participation as one of twenty Hollywood stars to play in a simultaneous exhibition against Sammy Reshevsky (then nine years old) at the Los Angeles Athletic Club in June 1921. Marcel Duchamp Best known as an artist, Duchamp later abandoned his artistic career in favor of chess. Prior to that time, his 1911 Portrait of Chess Players () contained Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess. He dropped painting in 1923, concentrating on chess and his strength became near master class. Duchamp can be seen, very briefly, playing chess with Man Ray in the 1924 short film Entr'acte by René Clair. He designed the 1925 Poster for the Third French Chess Championship, and later became a chess journalist, writing weekly newspaper columns. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success with art, Duchamp observed, "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art – and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position." Later he said "while not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists." Duchamp composed an enigmatic endgame chess problem in 1943, included in the announcement for Julian Lev's gallery exhibition "Through the Big End of the Opera Glass". It was printed on translucent paper with the faint inscription: "White to play and win". Grandmasters and endgame specialists have since grappled with the problem with most concluding that there is no solution. In 1968, Duchamp and John Cage appeared together at a concert titled "Reunion", playing a game of chess and composing aleatoric music by triggering a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chess board. Leonhard Euler The mathematician described an 8x8 square with each square containing one of the numbers from 1 through 64. This square was simultaneously a semimagic square (all the rows and columns, but not the diagonals, add up to the same sum) and a solution to the Knight's tour problem according to which all 64 of the squares of the chess board must be traversed in a series of knight's moves. Benjamin Franklin The American Founding Father and scientific experimenter began playing circa 1733, making him the first player known by name in the American colonies.