![]() Sherwin, who died in October 2021 at age 84, in American Prometheus.) But many of his closest friends and family were party members at one point or another: his brother, Frank Oppenheimer his friend Haakon Chevalier and his future wife, Kitty Oppenheimer. (“Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise-as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years,” wrote Bird and co-author Martin J. Oppenheimer was “likely sympathetic to … communist goals,” according to the nonprofit Atomic Heritage Foundation, but he never officially joined the party. He had also fallen in love with Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh in Nolan’s film), a dues-paying member of the Communist Party who awakened his interest in politics. “He was sort of a caricature of the eccentric professor,” Bird says, an intellectual omnivore who read Sanskrit, loved Elizabethan poetry, rode horses and made a great martini. But by the time World War II broke out in 1939, Oppenheimer had transformed himself into a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. He struggled with mental health issues while pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Cambridge-“I was on the point of bumping myself off,” he later recalled-and ended up on probation after lacing an apple with chemicals and leaving it on his tutor’s desk. ![]() If Harvard was easy, growing out of his awkward adolescence was harder. ![]() Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Projectīorn into a secular Jewish family in New York City in 1904 and educated at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture School, Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in just three years. Oppenheimer provides an opportunity to revisit this charismatic, contradictory man and reconsider how previous attempts to tell his story have succeeded-and failed-at fathoming one of the 20th century’s most fascinating public figures. Starring Cillian Murphy of “ Peaky Blinders” fame in the title role alongside an ensemble A-list cast, the film (which uses American Prometheus as its main source material) will reintroduce the scientist and the top-secret bomb project he helmed to a new generation of Americans. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on July 21, will be the first feature-length film to tackle the scientist’s life in its entirety, and it promises to be spectacular. ![]()
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