Kim harris stephen fry biography

Stephen Fry and Chess

Edward Winter

A celebrity with a considerable interest in chess is the British writer, actor and presenter Stephen Fry. This photograph appeared in his autobiography Moab is My Washpot (London, 1997) and is reproduced here with his permission.

‘Playing chess with Hugh Laurie: my rooms at Cambridge, 1980’

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We are also authorized to quote extracts from two chess articles by Stephen Fry. The first, ‘Chess Piece’, was published on page 23 of The Listener, 24 November 1988:

‘The sight of a pasty-faced creature in bottle-end spectacles pushing little wooden men around a board hardly qualifies as throbbing pageant. Knowing the rules isn’t enough either. You can sit in a hall and try to follow a game of grandmaster chess and be certain that the only people in the world who have thesa faintest grasp of the position on the board are the two players playing. Ex-world champions and mighty pundits have all been known to watch a difficult game a

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Stephen Fry – National Treasure.

Aside

We’re having a bit of a Fry Fest here in the UK at present to celebrate his 50th Birthday. I have had to revise my – less than charitable - view of Stephen formed mainly as a Pavlovian reaction to his stint in prison and his deserting a new play which then failed. I gods wrote about him to give an account of his brilliant and intensely personal TV programme ‘Secret Life of a Manic Depressive’, for friends who were unable to watch it. After such a searingly honest account one couldn’t fail to be more compassionate and understanding.
The programme itself was a ray of light shining on the hidden murky depths that mental illness is regularly consigned to and gave comfort to thousands of sufferers who previously felt shunned and stigmatised.

Now he is doing the same for virus sufferers – honest as ever about his gay status and turning a critical but compassionate eye on them. Stephen’s first love at Ca

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My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake.

Having left the year before he came up, I could have reassured him there was little danger. Everyone, as he puts it, was in the same punt. Cambridge in the late 1970s featured only the usual sprinkling of genuine intellectuals and egregious talents — of whom Fry was an outstanding example. His opinions were perfect for the time and place. He considered F. R. Leavis a ‘sanctimonious prick’, abstained from D. H. Lawrence and Hardy, wallowed in T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and took an informed, but sceptical, line on the ‘Parisian post-structuralists and their impenetrable evangels’. Elsewhere it might have mattered not to follow the Clash, but not in Cambridge.

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Fry also had a sex life, at a time when female undergraduates