A Beautiful Mind left out John Nash love child, gay experiences that Hollywood can’t sell - TomoNews
- 9 years ago
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY — John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, was killed in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike on Saturday. Although a giant in the world of academia, most members of the general public weren’t aware of him until the release of the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.
While A Beautiful Mind went on to win four academy awards, the story of John Nash’s life as told by Hollywood took a few liberties with the truth. Some of those are outlined below.
(To learn more about John Nash’s contributions to the fields of game theory, pure mathematics and economics, read this article in The Guardian: http://bit.ly/1Bl3cGX)
The 2001 movie shows Nash writing his dissertation on the Nash Equilibrium at Princeton in 1950. Then he goes to work at the Pentagon, in Virginia. In reality he became a consultant for the RAND Corporation in California.
In the movie, Nash’s famous paranoid schizophrenia surfaced at this time, but in reality it wasn’t diagnosed until 1959, freezing his career for decades.
The movie details Nash’s relationship with his wife, Alicia Nash, nee Lopez-Harrison de Larde, whom he married in 1957. But, in order to make Nash into a more sympathetic character, the film omits the fact that he sired a son in 1951 with a nurse, Eleanor Stier.
In 1954, he was fired by the RAND Corporation after being arrested in a sting targeting homosexual men in Santa Monica, California. All charges against him were dropped.
Although Nash and his wife Alicia eventually reunited, the film ignored the decades they spent apart. After divorcing in 1963, Alicia Nash cared for John at her home from 1970 onward, but they didn’t remarry until 2001.
Nash also stopped taking meds for his schizophrenia after 1970, a point which the film changed out of fear that other people with mental illness would use Nash’s experience as an excuse to stop taking their own meds.
Semi-biographical dramas about famous scientists are in fashion this year (see The Imitation
While A Beautiful Mind went on to win four academy awards, the story of John Nash’s life as told by Hollywood took a few liberties with the truth. Some of those are outlined below.
(To learn more about John Nash’s contributions to the fields of game theory, pure mathematics and economics, read this article in The Guardian: http://bit.ly/1Bl3cGX)
The 2001 movie shows Nash writing his dissertation on the Nash Equilibrium at Princeton in 1950. Then he goes to work at the Pentagon, in Virginia. In reality he became a consultant for the RAND Corporation in California.
In the movie, Nash’s famous paranoid schizophrenia surfaced at this time, but in reality it wasn’t diagnosed until 1959, freezing his career for decades.
The movie details Nash’s relationship with his wife, Alicia Nash, nee Lopez-Harrison de Larde, whom he married in 1957. But, in order to make Nash into a more sympathetic character, the film omits the fact that he sired a son in 1951 with a nurse, Eleanor Stier.
In 1954, he was fired by the RAND Corporation after being arrested in a sting targeting homosexual men in Santa Monica, California. All charges against him were dropped.
Although Nash and his wife Alicia eventually reunited, the film ignored the decades they spent apart. After divorcing in 1963, Alicia Nash cared for John at her home from 1970 onward, but they didn’t remarry until 2001.
Nash also stopped taking meds for his schizophrenia after 1970, a point which the film changed out of fear that other people with mental illness would use Nash’s experience as an excuse to stop taking their own meds.
Semi-biographical dramas about famous scientists are in fashion this year (see The Imitation