Russell Crowe - The Prose & the Passion

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A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Filmed - Mar 26, 2001 – July 31, 2001

Director:	Ron Howard
Cast:	Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Ed Harris, Judd Hirsch, Christopher Plummer
Release Date:	December 21, 2001
Running Time:	2 hr
Rating:	PG-13
Studio:	Universal Pictures
Trailer:	RealVideo \| WindowsMedia \| Don't Know
Official Site:	http://www.abeautifulmind....

Premise: The film is based on a 1998 novel "A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr." by Sylvia Nasar which chronicles the life of noted mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. who suffered from schizophrenia. The story covers his years of suffering-including his relationships with men, his marriage, a mistress and the fathering of an illegitimate son--and his eventual recovery.

Background: John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia and received a BA and MA in mathematics at Carnegie-Mellon University. In 1950, while at Princeton, Nash wrote his doctorate dissertation, "Nash Equilibrium", on strategic non-cooperative games, which was subsequently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is considered to be the father of modern game theory. Later, he went on to break one of Bernhard Riemann's most bewildering mathematical problems and was on the verge of being recognized as one of the world's leading mathematicians. At the age of 30, he was awarded tenure at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Though seemingly destined for greatness, Nash was institutionalized in 1959 at the age of 31 after being diagnosed as schizophrenic. He then spent the next three decades wandering Europe and America alternating between intermittent hospitalization and occasional remission. After making a remarkable recovery in the mid-80's, Nash went on to win a 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics. The movie will focus on Nash's relationship with his wife and his path from his early success to mental illness to recovery.