The true story of Beth Harmon, the brilliant protagonist of ‘The Queen’s Gambit’

If after watching The Queen’s Gambit you are wondering if the story of Elizabeth Harmon and chess is real, you are not the only one.

Last Friday, October 23, Netflix premiered The Queen’s Gambit, a new miniseries starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Elizabeth Harmon, a chess prodigy.

The series has been a brutal success and many already classify it as the best of the entire year since it has a 100 out of 100 on Rotten Tomatoes. More perfect, impossible.

And such fascination of course comes with doubts and the biggest of all is whether The Queen’s Gambit is inspired by a true story or not.

But don’t worry, here we will answer all your questions about this extraordinary Netflix miniseries.

What is The Queen’s Gambit about?

The plot takes place between 1950 and 1960 and follows Elizabeth Harmon, a little girl who, after losing her mother in a terrible accident, is placed in a girls’ orphanage.

There, thanks to Mr. Sheibel, the place’s concierge, Beth discovers the world of chess and her amazing talent for playing it. A talent that will bring you both success and deep emotional conflicts.

It is based on the book of the same name written by Walter Tevis in 1983, which at the time was praised for its precise explanation of this mental sport.

The name of both the novel and the series refer to a chess opening move known as the Queen’s Gambit or Queen’s Gambit.

Queen’s Gambit: who’s who in the cast?

Anya Taylor Joy plays Elizabeth Harmon, the protagonist of the story, a young woman as brilliant as she is competitive who is determined to become the best chess player in the world.

William Camp plays Mr. Shaibel, the orphanage’s janitor and Beth Harmon’s chess teacher, so he is the first to notice the girl’s enormous talent.

Moses Ingram is Jolene, Beth’s only “friend” and the indirect culprit of her becoming dependent on tranquilizers, a problem that will mark her for the rest of her life.

Added to them are:

Christiane Seidel as Helen Deardorff, the orphanage director Rebecca Root as Miss Londsdale Chloe Pirrie as Alice Harmon, Beth’s deceased mother Marielle Heller as Mrs. Alma Wheatley, Beth’s adoptive mother and manager Patrick Kennedy as Allston Wheastley, the Beth’s distant adoptive father Jacob Fortune Lloyd as Townes Thomas Brodie-Sanster as Benny Watts Marcin Doroncinsky as Vasily Borgov Sergio Di Zio Dolores Carbonari Matthew Denis Russell Dennis Janina Elkin

Now…to the heart of the matter

Is Elizabeth Harmon’s story real?

Well look, yes and no.

Because although Elizabeth Harmon is just a fictional character created by Walter Tevis, the author of The Queen’s Gambit, she IS inspired by several true stories.

Among them is that of Tevis himself, who in an interview with The New York Times conducted after the release of the novel (and shortly before his death in 1984) revealed how he built Beth’s personality.

In it he said that he, like the protagonist of his story, started playing chess since he was little and even became a class C player, a fairly high level within this mental sport.

Likewise, Tevis also faced a problem of dependency on alcohol and tranquilizers that took him a lot of time and effort to overcome.

As for the game itself, the writer said that it was based on three of the greatest chess players in history: Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov and Robert Fischer.

However, he did not include any of the three as characters in his book to keep everything in the realm of fiction.

For his part, Scott Frank, creator of the Netflix series, also took Robbie Fischer and his biopic The Fischer Case as a basis for the evolution of the character played by Taylor-Joy.

And like Beth, the greatest opponent that Fischer encountered in his career as a chess player was the Russian Boris Spassky.

However, the final confrontation between Fischer and Spassky occurred in Iceland at the 1972 world chess championship and not in the USSR as with Beth Harmon and Vasily Borgov.

So there you have it, now that you know the story behind The Queen’s Gambit and the intriguing character of Elizabeth Harmon, you can enjoy the series even more.