Interview: A Beautiful Mind's Author

Sylvia Nasar lay awake many nights in the mid-1990s worrying whether any anxiety caused by the biography she was writing about the Princeton mathematician John Nash would make him lapse back into the schizophrenic episodes that ravaged so many years of his life. But the 1998 publication of the book, "A Beautiful Mind," and the Oscar-winning movie of the same name instead became part of the long-running story of Nash's miraculous turnaround. In this "third act," as Nasar calls it, Nash overcame mental illness, rebuilt his life, and ultimately became an international celebrity known not just for Russell Crowe's portrayal of him in the 2001 movie but for his outsized contributions to mathematics and economics, which had won him the 1994 Nobel Prize. Not featured in the film, and lesser known to the outside world, was how he experienced day-to-day life, relishing the little things while caring for his son, Johnny, who also suffers from schizophrenia.