AP News, October 25th, 2007
Eve Curie Labouisse, a journalist who wrote a best-selling biography of her mother, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, has died. She was 102.
Labouisse died Monday in her Manhattan apartment, her stepdaughter, Anne L. Peretz, said Thursday.
Her book "Madame Curie," published in 1937, chronicled the life of Labouisse's mother from her birth in Poland and education in France to her discovery — with her husband, Pierre Curie — of the radioactive elements radium and polonium.
The book was highly regarded but left out mention of an affair Curie had with a married man after Pierre's death in 1906. Curie died in 1934.
"Madame Curie" was made into a 1943 movie starring Greer Garson as Marie and Walter Pidgeon as Pierre.
Marie Curie was awarded two Nobel prizes: in physics, which she shared with her husband in 1903, and in chemistry in 1911. Her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, Labouisse's only sibling, shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 with her husband, Frederic Joliot.
The Curies' remarkable record prompted Labouisse to remark in later life that "I am the only one of the family not to have won a Nobel Prize."
Labouisse fled her native France after it fell to the Nazis in 1940; the Vichy government revoked her citizenship the following year. She worked as a war correspondent, wrote a 1943 book, "Journal Among Warriors," and became a staunch advocate of the Free French cause.
She eventually settled in the United States. She married Henry R. Labouisse, a United Nations diplomat, in 1954, becoming an advocate for needy children during her husband's 15-year tenure as executive director of UNICEF.
He died in 1987. In addition to her stepdaughter, Labouisse is survived by four step-grandchildren and seven step-great-grandchildren.
