Ève Curie

Ève Curie (born Dec. 6, 1904, Paris, France—died Oct. 22, 2007, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was a French and American concert pianist, journalist, and diplomat, a daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Curie. She is best known for writing a biography of her mother, Madame Curie (1937).

Early life

Ève Curie was born a year after her parents received (together with Henri Becquerel) a Nobel Prize for Physics for their research concerning radioactivity. After Pierre’s death in 1906 from a collision with a horse-drawn wagon, Marie Curie focused her efforts on completing the research she and Pierre had undertaken together. She went on to win the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Ève’s older sister Irène Joliot-Curie and brother-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie also won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, in 1935 for their discovery of new radioactive isotopes. Although Ève Curie earned bachelor’s degrees in science and philosophy from the Collège Sévigné in 1925, her real aptitude was music and writing, which her mother encouraged. Ève Curie’s frequent classical piano recitals across France and Belgium were interspersed with musical reviews written for various publications. In the 1920s and ’30s she was widely noted for her beauty; during a 1921 tour of the United States with her mother, the American press called Ève Curie “the girl with radium eyes.”

Ève Curie lived with (and traveled on her concert engagements with) her mother, whose health deteriorated as she slowly died of leukemia, thought to have been caused by Marie’s long-term exposure to radioactive elements. (In 1956 Irène Joliot-Curie also died of leukemia. Years later Ève Curie wrote of her guilt at having avoided the same fate.) After Marie’s death in 1934, Ève wrote a biography of her mother that became an instant international best seller and was made into a Hollywood film (1943) starring British-American actress Greer Garson as Marie and Canadian-born American actor Walter Pidgeon as Pierre. Although the biography—and later the film adaptation—inspired many girls to pursue a career in science, it was criticized for leaving out both the sex discrimination that Marie had to battle throughout her career and any mention of Marie’s scandalous affair with a married man, which had been widely reported in newspapers.

A chapter from Madame Curie, “The Discovery of Radium,” is included in Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books (1963).

International journalist and diplomat

Following the outbreak of World War II, Ève Curie left Paris for England on June 11, 1940. She immediately joined the Free French and went to the United States early in 1941 to lecture on the war. She was soon hired by the International Herald Tribune as a war correspondent, and she went on to travel to and report from North Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, India, Burma [Myanmar], and China. She recounted these adventures in Journey Among Warriors (1943). After the liberation of Paris, Ève Curie copublished a daily newspaper, the Paris-Presse (1945–49), and in 1952 she was appointed as a special adviser to the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In 1954 she married Henry Labouisse, who served as director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East from 1954 to 1958, the year that Ève Curie became a U.S. citizen. From 1962 to 1965 he was the U.S. ambassador to Greece and she was the director of UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) in Greece. (Her husband was the executive director of UNICEF from 1965 to 1979.) After her husband’s death in 1987, Ève Curie divided her time between Greece, Paris, and New York City, where she made her last public appearances at dinners honouring her on her 100th birthday.