Eve Curie Labouisse, a journalist and humanitarian best-known for her biography of her mother, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, died Monday at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 102
Ms. Labouisse’s stepdaughter, Anne Peretz, confirmed the death.
Published in 1937, “Madame Curie” chronicled the life of Marie Curie, who earned the Nobel Prize twice, first in physics in 1903 (the award was shared with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel) and again in chemistry in 1911.
Ms. Labouisse’s admiring portrait followed her mother from her birth and girlhood in Poland through her education in France and her discovery, with her husband, of the radioactive elements radium and polonium. The book quickly became a best seller and in 1943 was made into a Hollywood film.
In wide demand as a lecturer after “Madame Curie” was published, Ms. Labouisse was also known for her staunch public advocacy of the Free French cause after the Nazis occupied France in 1940. After the war, she was a publisher of the French newspaper Paris-Press, and in the early 1950s was a special adviser to the secretary general of NATO.
Her other books include “Journey Among Warriors” (1943), a best-selling account of her 40,000-mile trip across a series of wartime fronts including North Africa, Iraq, Iran, Russia, India, Burma and China.
Throughout her life, Ms. Labouisse appeared to have taken her famous family in stride. “You are not mixing me up with my sister by any chance?” she asked an interviewer in 1972. “You see, I am the only one of the family not to have won a Nobel Prize.” In 1935, Ms. Labouisse’s older sister, Irene Joliot-Curie, and her husband, Frederic Joliot, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their synthesis of new radioactive elements.