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A Beautiful Mind
Directed by	Ron Howard
Produced by	Brian Grazer Ron Howard
Written by	Sylvia Nasar (book), Akiva Goldsman
Starring	Russell Crowe Jennifer Connelly Ed Harris Paul Bettany Christopher Plummer Adam Goldberg Anthony Rapp
Music by	James Horner
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Released	December 21, 2001
Running time	135 min.
Language	English
Budget	$60,000,000
IMDb profile

A Beautiful Mind is a book and Academy Award-winning film (starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Bettany) about the Nobel Prize (Economics) winning mathematician John Nash and his experiences of schizophrenia. The biography, written by Sylvia Nasar, was published in 1998. The movie, inspired by the biography of the same name, was released in 2001. Image File history File links Derived from public domain images featured at: http://commons. ... This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... Ron Howard on the set of Ransom Ronald William Howard (born March 1, 1954, in Duncan, Oklahoma) is an American actor, film director and producer of Dutch, Scottish, English, Irish, German and Cherokee Indian descent. ... Brian Grazer (born July 12, 1951, in Los Angeles, California) is a Jewish-American film and television producer who founded Imagine Entertainment with partner Ron Howard. ... Ron Howard on the set of Ransom. ... Sylvia Nasar (born 1947 in Bavaria) is an American journalist and writer. ... Akiva Goldsman is a writer, producer, and actor in the film industry. ... Russell Crowe Russell Ira Crowe (born April 7, 1964) is an Oscar-winning New Zealand-Australian film actor. ... Jennifer Connelly in the 2003 drama House of Sand and Fog Jennifer Lynn Connelly (born December 12, 1970) is an American Academy Award-winning film actress. ... Ed Harris Edward Allen Ed Harris (born November 28, 1950) is an American actor. ... Paul Bettany Paul Bettany (born May 27, 1971) is an English actor. ... Christopher Plummer photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1959 Christopher Plummer CC, (born Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer on December 13, 1927), is a Canadian theatrical, film and television actor. ... Adam Goldberg Adam Goldberg (born October 25, 1970 in Santa Monica, California) in appearance and speech typifies the quintessential young New York Jew in many movies and TV programs of the 1990s and 2000s; including the title role of the self-parodying Jewsploitation movie The Hebrew Hammer. ... Anthony Rapp Anthony Dean Rapp is an American stage and film actor. ... James Horner James Horner (born August 14, 1953 in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer of orchestral music. ... The current Universal Studios logo Universal Studios, a subsidiary of NBC Universal, has production studios and offices located at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City, California, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County between Los Angeles and Burbank. ... December 21 is the 355th day of the year (356th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... Look up book in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Academy Awards The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are the most prominent film awards in the United States and most watched awards ceremony in the world. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed. ... Russell Crowe Russell Ira Crowe (born April 7, 1964) is an Oscar-winning New Zealand-Australian film actor. ... Ed Harris Edward Allen Ed Harris (born November 28, 1950) is an American actor. ... Jennifer Connelly in the 2003 drama House of Sand and Fog Jennifer Lynn Connelly (born December 12, 1970) is an American Academy Award-winning film actress. ... Christopher Plummer photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1959 Christopher Plummer CC, (born Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer on December 13, 1927), is a Canadian theatrical, film and television actor. ... Paul Bettany Paul Bettany (born May 27, 1971) is an English actor. ... Sir Edward Appletons medal Photographs of Nobel Prize Medals. ... The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (in Swedish Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is a prize awarded each year for outstanding intellectual contributions in the field of economics. ... Leonhard Euler is considered by many people to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and research is mathematics. ... John Forbes Nash Jr. ... Sir Thomas Malory wrote the most famous fictional biography of the Middle Ages with Le Morte dArthur about the life of King Arthur. ... Sylvia Nasar (born 1947 in Bavaria) is an American journalist and writer. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ...

The movie's inspiration

The book A Beautiful Mind is a detailed biography of John Nash, including his work as a mathematician and his private life. The book won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as making the New York Times bestseller list. It is particularly notable for the clarity and detail; and accessibility of its treatment of Nash's mathematical accomplishments. 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American association of approximately seven hundred book reviewers. ... The gold medal awarded for Public Service in Journalism The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical compositions. ... The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ...

Plot

As the story unfolds, Nash is able to work through his illness to (in his words) "matter" in the world. This film is essentially a story of how a brilliant man was able to live with the vicissitudes of a debilitating mental illness to attain a true sense of accomplishment, or some would say, even a sense of greatness. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

At the beginning of the film, John Nash arrives as a new graduate student at Princeton University. He is a recipient of the prestigious Carnegie Prize for mathematics. He meets his roommate Charles, a literature student, who soon becomes his best friend. He also meets a group of other promising math and science graduate students, Martin Hansen, Sol, and Bender, with whom he strikes up an awkward friendship. Princeton University is a coeducational private university located on an extensive campus in and around suburban Princeton, New Jersey. ... The Carnegie Prize is an international prize for artists, awarded by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ... Euclid, detail from The School of Athens by Raphael. ... A roommate is a person with whom one shares a room or rooms. ...

The first part of the film establishes Nash's intellectual stamina and his propensity to be too outspoken in his social life. He admits that he is better with numbers than people, saying, "I don't like them much, and they don't much like me." He sometimes goes out to a bar with his fellow students to try to meet women, but is always unsuccessful. However, the experience is what ultimately inspires his fruitful work in the concept of governing dynamics, a theory in mathematical economics. In game theory, the Nash equilibrium (named after John Nash) is a kind of optimal strategy for games involving two or more players, where no player has anything to gain by changing only ones own strategy. ... Mathematical economics is the sub-field of economics that explores the mathematical aspects of economic systems. ...

After the conclusion of Nash's studies as a student at Princeton, he accepts a prestigious appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with his friends Sol and Bender. It is while at this post that he meets Alicia, a student who he falls in love with and eventually marries. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is one of the worlds leading research institutions in science and technology. ...

While at Princeton, Nash runs into his former roommate Charles and meets Charles's young niece Marcee. He also encounters a mysterious Department of Defense agent, William Parcher. Nash is invited to a United States Department of Defense facility (The Pentagon) to crack a complex encryption of an enemy telecommunication. Nash is able to decipher the code mentally. Parcher observes Nash's performance from above, while partially concealed behind a screen. (His general appearance and behaviour is similar to that of the so-called Men in Black.) Parcher later encourages Nash to look for patterns in magazines and newspapers, ostensibly to thwart a Soviet plot. Nash becomes increasingly paranoid and begins to behave erratically. The United States Department of Defense, abbreviated as DoD or DOD and sometimes called the Defense Department, is a civilian Cabinet organization of the United States government. ... The United States Department of Defense, abbreviated as DoD or DOD and sometimes called the Defense Department, is a civilian Cabinet organization of the United States government. ... A pre-9/11 view of The Pentagon, looking east with the Potomac River and Washington Monument in the distance. ... Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, hidden, and analýein, to loosen or to untie) is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so. ... In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge. ... In UFO conspiracy theories, the term Men in Black (MIBs), also known as Men in Gray, are alleged to be men dressed in black suits claiming to be government agents who attempt to harass or threaten UFO witnesses into silence. ... State motto (Russian): Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь! (Transliterated: Proletarii vsekh stran, soedinyaytes!) (Translated: Workers of the world, unite!) Capital Moscow Official language None; Russian (de facto) Government Federation of Soviet republics Area  - Total  - % water 1st before collapse 22,402,200 km² Approx. ... Paranoid redirects here. ...

After observing this erratic behavior, Sol follows Nash during one of his late night drops of "top secret Soviet codes". Sol sees Nash place the documents into a drop-box at a long empty building, and reports this behaviour to Nash's superiors. He is forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric facility. Initially, Nash's internment seemed like confirmation of his belief that the Soviets were trying to extract information from him, and that getting picked up by the officials of that psychiatric facility was a kidnapping by Soviet agents. A psychiatric hospital (also called at various places and times, mental hospital, mental ward, asylum or sanitarium) is a hospital specializing in the treatment of persons with mental illness. ...

Alicia, desperate to help her husband, visits the drop-box and retrieves the never-opened "top secret" documents that Nash delivered there. When confronted with this evidence, Nash is finally convinced that he has been hallucinating. The Department of Defense agent William Parcher and Nash's secret assignment to decode Soviet messages was in fact all a delusion. Even more surprisingly, Nash's friend Charles and his niece Marcee are also only products of Nash's mind. An hallucination is a sensory perception experienced in the absence of an external stimulus, as distinct from an illusion, which is a misperception of an external stimulus. ... A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception. ...

After a painful series of insulin shock therapy sessions, Nash is released on the condition that he agrees to take antipsychotic medication. However, these drugs create negative side-effects that impact his relationship with his wife and, most dramatically, his intellect. Frustrated, Nash secretly stops taking his medication, triggering a relapse of his psychosis. While bathing his infant son, Nash becomes distracted and wanders off. Alicia barely manages to save their child from being drowned. When she confronts Nash, he claims that his (hallucinatory) friend Charles was watching their son. Charles, Marcee, and Parcher all appear to John and urge him to kill his wife rather than allow her to lock him up again. Nash finally realizes that these people are products of his own mind when he observes that Marcee is the same age that she was when he first met her several years before. Only then does he accept that all three of these people are, in fact, part of his psychosis. Insulin shock therapy is a treatment for schizophrenia, psychosis and drug addiction which involves injecting a patient with massive amounts of insulin, which causes convulsions and coma. ... The term antipsychotic is applied to a group of drugs used to treat psychosis. ... An adverse drug reaction (abbreviated ADR) is a term to describe the unwanted, negative consequences sometimes associated with the use of medications. ...

Caught between the intellectual paralysis of the antipsychotic drugs and his delusions, Nash and his wife decide to try to live with his schizophrenia. Nash attempts to ignore his hallucinations and not feed "his demons". The rest of the movie depicts Nash growing older while working on his studies in the library of Princeton University. He still suffers hallucinations and periodically has to check if new people he meets are real, but with the help of newer antipsychotic drugs he is ultimately able to live with and largely ignore his psychosis. Nash approaches his old friend and intellectual rival Martin Hansen, now head of the Princeton mathematics department, and receives permission to begin teaching again. He is honored by his fellow professors for his achievement in mathematics, and goes on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his revolutionary work on game theory. Princeton University is a coeducational private university located on an extensive campus in and around suburban Princeton, New Jersey. ... The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (in Swedish Sveriges Riksbanks pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is a prize awarded each year for outstanding intellectual contributions in the field of economics. ... Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns. ...

Fictionalized nature of film

The movie should not be regarded as a biography of Nash, nor as a film version of Nasar's book. It is a drama inspired by the life of John Nash.

Goldsman brought to the script his life experience as the son of child psychologist Mira Rothenberg, who maintained a group home for emotionally disturbed children in the family's residence. Goldsman said that his goal was "to use [the story of John Nash's] journey to give some insight into what it might feel like to suffer from this disease." It can be inferred that Goldsman's priority was conveying his conception of the truth of the inner experience of schizophrenia, rather than the documenting the factual data of John Nash's life. In an interview, Goldsman stated: Hans Baldung Grien: The Ages And Death, c. ...

I was reasonably absurd in my approach. I don't know how to write a bio-pic and this was one of the best researched scholarly biographies I'd ever read. Instead I wanted to use my understanding of what I'd read with additional research to evoke the grander beats of John's life. I didn't want it to be literal. I wanted to take [a] stab at the truth of John's life, but not by way of the facts.^[1]

Critics argue that the movie glosses over his alleged homosexual relationships, his anti-semitic statements, his abandoning a woman shortly after fathering a child with her, and that it rewrites his actual psychotic experience (eg. being "attacked by Napoleon" or being "the left foot of God") into a more exciting but fictional account. The producers of the film argue that the claims of Nash's relationships with men are unverified and that Nash himself continues to deny that he is homosexual. The producers claim that they omitted the anti-semitic remarks because they did not serve the story. Nash himself has argued that although he did make these comments, he was extremely mentally ill at the time. The word homosexuality has acquired multiple meanings over time. ... The Eternal Jew: 1937 German poster. ... Psychosis is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state in which thought and perception are severely impaired. ...

The movie also misrepresents the effect Nash's mental illness had on his work. The movie depicts Nash as already suffering from schizophrenia when he wrote his doctoral thesis. In reality, Nash's schizophrenia did not appear until years later and once it did his mathematical work ceased until he was able to bring it under control.

Many of the specific incidents and life events depicted in the movie do not correspond to anything mentioned in Nasar's biography. "There are many discrepancies between the book and the film," says a Nash FAQ on the Princeton website [1]. For example, the pen ceremony "was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists." The scene in which Nash thanks his wife Alicia during his Nobel prize acceptance speech is fictitious; Nobel prize winners do not give acceptance speeches, and Nash was not invited to give the traditional Nobel lecture due to concerns about his illness. FAQ is an abbreviation for Frequently Asked Question(s). The term refers to listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. ... This page as shown in the aol 9. ... Greetings from Hollywood Hollywood is a district of the city of Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., that extends from Vermont Avenue on the east to just beyond Laurel Canyon Boulevard above Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevards on the west; the north to south boundary east of La Brea Avenue...

The plot of the movie makes much of Alicia Nash's unwavering devotion to her husband. In reality, the couple divorced in 1963 and lived apart for several years. In 1970, Alicia allowed John to live in her house but it was not a romantic relationship. It was not until the 1990s, when John was recovering from his mental illness, that their romantic relationship was revived and the couple remarried in 2001.

The scene in which Nash demonstrates to his girlfriend his ability to find any specified pattern in a starry sky does not correspond to anything in the book; nor does the scene in which Nash's infant son almost drowns because he believes that his hallucinatory colleague Charles is taking care of him; nor Nash having delusions of a password-generating device being implanted in his arm; nor were Nash's hallucinations both visual and auditory, in reality they were exclusively auditory. A girlfriend is a female partner in a non-marital romantic relationship with another person. ... A pattern is a form, template, or model (or, more abstractly, a set of rules) which can be used to make or to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are generated have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred or discerned... STAR is an acronym for: Satellite Television Asian Region, or STAR TV Scientific and Technological Advanced Research Labs, a fictional research organization in the DC Comics universe. ... A typical daytime sky. ...

Awards

The film version of A Beautiful Mind was created by Universal Pictures and DreamWorks. In 2001, the film was awarded four Oscars for: The current Universal Studios logo Universal Studios, a subsidiary of NBC Universal, has production studios and offices located at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City, California, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County between Los Angeles and Burbank. ... DreamWorks, L.L.C., doing business as DreamWorks SKG, is a Big Ten studio in the United States of America which develops, produces, and distributes films, video games, and television programming. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... Academy Awards The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are the most prominent film awards in the United States and most watched awards ceremony in the world. ...

• Adapted Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman
• Best Picture: Brian Grazer and Ron Howard
• Directing: Ron Howard
• Supporting Actress: Jennifer Connelly

It also received four other nominations: The Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay is one of the Academy Awards, the most prominent film awards in the United States. ... Akiva Goldsman is a writer, producer, and actor in the film industry. ... The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the awards are voted on by other people within the industry. ... Brian Grazer (born July 12, 1951, in Los Angeles, California) is a Jewish-American film and television producer who founded Imagine Entertainment with partner Ron Howard. ... Ron Howard on the set of Ransom Ronald William Howard (born March 1, 1954, in Duncan, Oklahoma) is an American actor, film director and producer of Dutch, Scottish, English, Irish, German and Cherokee Indian descent. ... The Academy Award for Directing is an accolade given to the person that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences feels was best director of the past year. ... The Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; nominations are made by Academy members who are actors and actresses. ... Jennifer Connelly in the 2003 drama House of Sand and Fog Jennifer Lynn Connelly (born December 12, 1970) is an American Academy Award-winning film actress. ...

• Best Actor in a Leading Role: Russell Crowe
• Film Editing: Mike Hill, Daniel P. Hanley
• Best Makeup: Greg Cannom, Colleen Callaghan
• Original Music Score: James Horner

The Academy Award for Best Actor is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; nominations are made by Academy members who are actors and actresses. ... Russell Crowe Russell Ira Crowe (born April 7, 1964) is an Oscar-winning New Zealand-Australian film actor. ... The Academy Award for Film Editing was first given for films issued in 1934. ... Mike Hill (Big Mike, MC Free, Big Free) is the leader of Christian rap group ETW. He met the two other members at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma after a brief time in the Army. ... These are the Academy Award for Makeup winners and nominees: 1980s 1981 An American Werewolf in London Heartbeeps 1982 Quest for Fire Gandhi 1983 none given 1984 Amadeus 2010: The Year We Make Contact Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle 1985 Mask The Color Purple 1986 The... From Rule Sixteen of the Special Rules for The Music Awards Original Score: An original score is a substantial body of music in the form of dramatic underscoring written specifically for the film by the submitting composer. ... James Horner James Horner (born August 14, 1953 in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer of orchestral music. ...

See also

• Cinderella Man, a 2005 movie whose creative team included many people who worked on A Beautiful Mind, to which it bears striking stylistic resemblances.

Cinderella Man is a 2005 American drama film titled after the nickname and inspired by the real life story of former Heavyweight boxing champion, James J. Braddock. ...

External links and references

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

A Beautiful Mind

• Entry in "Movie Glimpse", An
• Home Page of John F. Nash, Jr.
• A Beautiful Mind at The Internet Movie Database
• Nasar, S. (1999) A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. Simon and Schuster Inc. ISBN 0743224574
• Movie Review - Mark Sells, The Oregon Herald
• Page on the web site of Crazy for Cinema, A
• Sylvia Nasar Discusses Her Book, 'A Beautiful Mind;' Psychiatrist Roberto Gil: Schizophrenia and Recovery
• FAQ John Nash Princeton library site. Pen ceremony and Nobel acceptance speech fictitious.
• Maths illustrated Interesting details on math consultant Dave Bayer's contribution to film, including his cameo appearance in the pen ceremony scene.
• Beautiful Math: Dave Bayer ’77 writes Hollywood’s Equations.
• The Movie Quotes Site It has one of the biggest repository of quotes from this movie.

1. ^ Writers' Guild Awards: Akiva Goldman, Screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind