A Curie who did everything but win a Nobel

On October 22, 2007, Ève Curie, French author and daughter of Madame Curie, died at the age of 102. From the article:

"A Curie who did everything but win a Nobel

EVE CURIE, the daughter of the Nobel prize-winning scientists Pierre and Marie Curie, gained fame as a concert pianist, writer and biographer.

Her interests were musical and literary rather than scientific and Eve was the only member of her family who did not win a Nobel prize. In 1935 her elder sister, Irene, with her husband, Frederic Joliot, won the Nobel in chemistry for their synthesis of new radioactive elements. Yet Eve did much to promote her family's scientific reputation and was largely responsible for the creation of the Girls' Own heroine image of her mother with her triumphal biography published in 1937.

Eve Curie's account of her mother's life, from her childhood in Poland to her discovery, with her husband, of radioactive radium and polonium, became a bestseller and, in 1943, was made into an MGM film starring Greer Garson as Marie and Walter Pidgeon as Pierre.

Yet later reviewers criticised Eve for covering up the affair that Marie had after her husband's death with Paul Langevin, a former pupil of her husband's and married man with four children. Given when the book was published and the fact that Eve was writing about her mother, the omission was, perhaps, understandable. But the biography also minimised the humiliations Marie faced at the hands of the French scientific establishment and the Parisian tabloid press after her husband's death.

While the biography may have inspired generations of scientifically minded girls to believe that they could succeed in a male-dominated profession, it did not give a true picture of the hurdles they might face.

Eve Denise Curie, who has died at 102, was born in Paris the year after her parents, with Henri Becquerel, won the Nobel prize for physics. Pierre was killed when she was two when he fell under the wheels of a carriage. As a child, Eve saw little of her mother, only becoming close to her as a teenager. After Irene's marriage, Eve lived with her mother and nursed her through the leukaemia, which eventually killed her in 1934.

Eve Curie achieved degrees in science and philosophy, but her true interests were artistic. A proficient pianist, she performed her first concert in Paris in 1925 and played in France and Belgium until World War II. Chic and dark-haired, she attracted as much attention for her beauty as for her playing. She also wrote music, theatre and film reviews.

In 1940, after the fall of France, Curie worked for the Free French in England and promoted the cause on lecture tours. In 1940 an essay, French Women and the War, was published in Atlantic Monthly. In 1943 a series of reports from various battle fronts was published as Journey Among Warriors.

After the war, she became co-publisher of the daily newspaper Paris Press and in 1952 was appointed a special adviser to the secretary-general of NATO. In 1954 she married Henry Labouisse, the American ambassador to Greece, who would serve as executive director of UNICEF when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. She became an American citizen and served as a director of UNICEF in Greece."