List of Famous People Who Play Chess

Famous people and chess

Link to celebrities pictures: http://sbchess.sinfree.net/celebritychess.html

Many famous persons in the past, as well as nowadays, played and studied chess as their favorite pastime. Those people has come from all the fields, and some of them even were pretty good players. Just imagine John Lennon and Yoko Ono or Madonna and Guy Ritchie or Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver playing chess at home?
This is only a glance list of celebrities enjoyed chess:

Sport starts

Kobe Bryant (NBA), Wilt Chamberlain (NBA), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (NBA), Larry Bird (NBA), Danny Ainge (NBA), Latrell Sprewell (NBA), Steve Smith (NBA), Jason Williams (NBA), Gary Sheffield (baseball player in New York Yankees), LaVar Arrington (NFL linebacker of Washington Redskins), Curtis Martin (NFL running back), Anna Kournikova (tennis), John McEnroe (tennis), Roger Federer (tennis), Boris Becker (tennis), Jennifer Capriati (tennis), Ivan Lendl (tennis), Rafael Benitez (soccer manager), Rick Carlisle (NBA, coach of Indiana Pacers), Flip Saunders (NBA, coach of Detroit Pistons), Bill Walsh (football coach of San Francisco 49ers), Dominic Hasek (hockey), Vitaly Klitschko (boxer), Lennox Lewis (boxer), Mike Powell (long jump world record holder)

Movie and TV starts

Marilyn Monroe, Ben Affleck, Salma Hayek, Nicholas Cage, Christina Ricci, Will Smith, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Keanu Reeves, Antonio Banderas, Steve Martin, Anthony Hopkins, Matt Damon, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Martin Lawrence, Brooke Shields, Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ingmar Bergman, Mel Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ian Holm, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Kubrick, David Letterman, James Mason, Paul Newman, Chuck Norris, Edward Norton, Bill O?Reilly, Al Pacino, Jason Priestley, Tim Robbins, Kevin Spacey, David Spade, Sylvester Stallone, Oliver Stone, Barbra Streisand, John Wayne, Robin Williams

Models

Carmen Kass, Heidi Klum

Writers

William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Asimov, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Honore de Balzac, Miguel de Cervantes, Jack London, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Johann Goethe, Poul Anderson, Martin Amis, Cleveland Amory, Shalom Aleichem,  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Pushkin, Salman Rusdie, Lev Tolstoy, Roger Zelazny, Oscar Wilde

Art and musicians

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, Frank Sinatra, Salvador Dali, Ludwig van Beethoven, Bono, LL COOL J, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Sting, Enrico Caruso, Ray Charles, Cher, Frederic Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, David Oistrakh, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Giuseppe Verdi

Scientists

Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize in Physics), Isaac Newton (physicist), Stephen Hawking (physicist), John Nash (Nobel Prize in Economics), Leonard Euler (mathematician), Enrico Fermi (physicist), Johann Karl Gauss (mathematician), John Harsanyi (Nobel Prize in Economics), Gottfried Leibnitz (mathematician), Mikhail Lomonosov (chemistry), Dmitri Mendeleev (chemistry), Robert Oppenheimer (physicist), Edward Prescott (Nobel Prize in Economics), Alan Turing (mathematician  and inventor of a first computer)

Kings and presidents

Abraham Lincoln (US President), George Washington (US President), Vladimir Lenin (Russian Leader), Napoleon Bonaparte (French Emperor), Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister), Theodore Roosevelt (US President), Jimmy Carter (US President), Thomas Jefferson (US President), Richard Nixon (US President), John Quincy Adams (US President), Al Gore (former US vice-president), Mikhail Gorbachev (former USSR president), Boris Yeltsin (Russian leader), Fidel Castro (Cuban President), Jacques Chirac (French president), Victoria(Queen of England),  Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), Peter the Great (Czar and Russian Emperor), Josef; Stalin (USSR leader), Yao Sui(Chinese Emperor), Alfonso XIII (King of Spain), Abdullah ibn Husain (King of Jordan), Akbar (Mongol Emperor), Cory Aquino (Philippine President), Yasser Arafat (Palestinian Leader), Arthur Balfour (British Prime Minister), Stephan Bathory (King of Poland), Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister), Catherine II (Russian Empress), Charles I (King of England), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya leader), Nikita Khruschev (USSR premier), Gamal Abdul Nasser (Egyptian leader), Anwar Sadat (Egyptian leader), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister), Leon Trotsky (Russian revolutionist)

Other famous and outstanding people

Christopher Columbus (US explorer), Arnold Schwarzenegger (actor and California governor) and Maria Shriver (wife of Schwarzenegger and TV news reporter), David Rockefeller (philanthropist), Baron Albert Rothschild (philanthropist), Charles Carroll (Declaration of Independence signer), Giovanni Casanova (Italian playboy), Al Capone (Criminal), Benjamin Franklin (American politician and inventor), George Soros (businessman), Ernesto Che Guevara (revolutionary), Harry Houdini (escape artist),  Henry Kissinger (American politician), Sir Francis Bacon (philosopher), La Fayette (military leader), Karl Marx (German politician), Aristotle Onassis (Greek businessman), Joseph Pulitzer (newspaper publisher), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (philosopher), Jean-Paul Sartre (philosopher), Howard Stern (radio and TV personality), Voltaire (philosopher)

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