Tobey Maguire to Possibly Star in Chess Legend Bobby Fischer Biopic
Now that Tobey Maguire isn't playing Peter Parker anymore he has time to focus on moving forward with some of his other projects. I seriously doubt he's all broke up about making anymore Spider-Man films. It looks like he may end up taking on the role of chess legend Bobby Fischer in a Biopic that he's producing.
According to Deadline Hollywood the film will be called Pawn Sacrifice and it will be a drama based around Fischer's unlikely victory over Russian chess champ Boris Spassky in 1972.
Bobby Fischer is an incredibly interesting individual, one that I've been waiting to see a biopic about for a long time. I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. There are a couple great documentaries that have been made on Fisher's life and some fantastic books. Here is a little run down about him in case some of you have no idea who he is.
Robert James "Bobby" Fischer (March 9, 1943 – January 17, 2008) was the eleventh World Chess Champion. He is widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time. He was the first official FIDE world number one rated chessplayer, and his 54 total months at number one is third all-time behind only Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. He remains the only American ever to become world number-one, and was the first player from a western nation to become world number-one, joined in this feat by Magnus Carlsen in 2010. Later in life Fischer renounced his US citizenship and became an Icelandic citizen.
Fischer's achievements are legendary. At 13, he won a brilliancy that became known as the Game of the Century. Starting at age 14, he played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a point. At 15½, he became both the youngest Grandmaster and the youngest Candidate for the World Championship up until that time. He won the 1963-64 US championship 11-0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament. In the early 1970s he became the most dominant player in modern history—winning the 1970 Interzonal by a record 3½-point margin and winning 20 consecutive games, including two unprecedented 6-0 sweeps in the Candidates Matches. According to research by Jeff Sonas, in 1971 Fischer had separated himself from the rest of the world by a larger margin of playing skill than any player since the 1870s.
In 1972, he wrested the World Championship from Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland that was widely publicized as a Cold War battle.
In 1975, Fischer did not defend his title when he could not come to agreement with the international chess federation FIDE over the conditions for the match. He became more reclusive and played no more competitive chess until 1992, when he won a rematch against Spassky. The competition was held in Yugoslavia, which was then under a strict United Nations embargo.This led to a conflict with the US government, and he never returned to his native country.
In his later years, Fischer lived in Hungary, Germany, the Philippines, and Japan. During this time he made increasingly anti-American and anti-Semitic statements, despite his Jewish ancestry. When his U.S. passport was revoked, he was detained by Japanese authorities for nine months in 2004 and 2005 under threat of extradition. After Iceland granted him citizenship, the Japanese authorities released him to that country, where he lived until his death in 2008.
I think Maguire is the perfect actor to take on a role like this.
What do you think about this biopic of Bobby Fischer and Maguire possibly taking on the role?