Woody Harrelson once drew a chess game with Garry Kasparov, with some grandmaster help
In Prague in 1999 an American actor sat down at the board against the reigning world chess champion and walked away with a draw. Woody Harrelson had company: several grandmasters in town for another match chipped in. It is one of many odd turns in a career that began behind the bar on Cheers.
Harrelson was born in Midland, Texas, on July 23, 1961. His mother, a secretary, kept the poor family afloat; his father, Charles Harrelson, was later jailed for life after federal judge John H. Wood Jr. was killed in 1979, and the actor says he saw little of him growing up. Raised Presbyterian, he moved to Lebanon, Ohio, in 1973, then studied theatre and English at Hanover College in Indiana, where he befriended a future vice president, Mike Pence, before graduating in 1983.
Two years later he joined Cheers in its fourth season as the sweetly naive bartender Woody Boyd, staying until the show ended in 1993 and winning an Emmy in 1989. Films ran alongside. He debuted in the football comedy Wildcats with Goldie Hawn, then teamed up again with Wesley Snipes, a fellow Wildcats newcomer, for White Men Can't Jump. Indecent Proposal took over 265 million dollars worldwide, and Oliver Stone cast him as Mickey Knox in Natural Born Killers.
His range widened later. He earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for The People vs. Larry Flynt and supporting nominations for The Messenger and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. On HBO he played the strategist Steve Schmidt in Game Change and, opposite Matthew McConaughey, the detective Marty Hart in True Detective. In 2017 he directed Lost in London, filmed in one continuous take and screened live.
Off screen the stories pile up. A joke wedding in Tijuana in 1985 to Neil Simon's daughter lasted ten months because the parlour was shut when they went back to divorce. He scored the winning penalty for the Rest of the World at Soccer Aid 2010 at Old Trafford, saying afterwards he could not recall the kick. He eats a raw vegan diet, so the Twinkies in Zombieland were cornmeal fakes, and he has made the ceremonial first move at two world chess championships.
Source: Woody Harrelson
