Eve Curie Labouisse, 102; daughter, biographer of scientist Marie Curie

Eve Curie Labouisse, 102, a journalist who wrote a best-selling biography of her mother, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, died Monday at her Manhattan apartment, said her stepdaughter, Anne L. Peretz.

Labouisse’s book “Madame Curie,” published in 1937, chronicled her mother’s life from her birth in Poland and education in France to her discovery -- with her husband Pierre Curie -- of the radioactive elements radium and polonium.

Marie Curie was awarded two Nobel prizes: in physics, which she shared with her husband in 1903, and in chemistry in 1911.

The book, published three years after her mother’s death, is considered a classic among scientific biographies. But it has been criticized by some for leaving out an affair that Curie had with a married man after her husband’s death.

“Madame Curie” was made into a 1943 movie starring Greer Garson as Marie Curie and Walter Pidgeon as Pierre.

Labouisse fled her native France after it fell to the Nazis in 1940. She worked as a war correspondent, wrote a 1943 book, “Journal Among Warriors,” and became a staunch advocate of the Free French cause.

She eventually settled in the United States. She married Henry R. Labouisse, a United Nations diplomat, in 1954, becoming an advocate for needy children during her husband’s 15-year tenure as executive director of UNICEF. He died in 1987.