Name |
Was Known As |
Age of Retirement |
Ostensible Reason |
Became |
Steven Demetre Georgiou (1948–) |
Cat Stevens; singer / songwriter, teen idol, folk artist |
29 |
Converted to Islam |
Yusuf Islam; supporter of fatwa against Salman Rushdie; aid worker in war-torn Bosnia; secular musician again in 2006 with An Other Cup |
Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) |
Chess grandmaster; child prodigy, finicky opponent |
29 |
Disagreed with World Chess Federation over playing conditions; experienced increased feeling of paranoia |
Eccentric anti-Semite; played first match in 20 years in 1992 against Boris Spaasky in Yugoslavia and won $3.65 million; renounced U.S. citizenship |
Greta Garbo (1905–1990) |
Actress; star of European silent pictures and of Hollywood talkies |
36 |
Horrified by poor reviews for Two-Faced Woman |
Recluse; traveled extensively; embodied her famous line from Grand Hotel, “I want to be alone” |
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) |
Avant-garde artist; inventor of ready-mades, prankster |
36 |
Abandoned art for chess because it had “all the beauty of art—and much more” |
Chess master and journalist; wrote treatises on hypermodern endgame positions |
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) |
Poet; homosexual, absinthe drinker |
19 |
Shot with a revolver by his lover poet Paul Verlaine; exhausted his interest in poetry |
Soldier in Dutch colonial army in Java; foreman for construction company at a stone quarry in Cyprus; coffee and weapons trader in Yemen and Ethiopia |
Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) |
Leading scholastic theologian and lecturer; master dialectician |
40 |
Disgraced and castrated for having seduced and impregnated Héloïse |
Monk; attempted to teach again, but his work was declared heretical and burned; wrote The Story of My Misfortunes |