"A Beautiful Mind" is both a biography and a film, currently in production, about the life of John Forbes Nash Jr. Mr. Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, but the work he did to earn it was basically done in the 1950's. In the interim, this highly respected mathematical genius spent close to 30 years in the jaws of paranoid schizophrenia. After and during graduate school at Princeton and faculty work at MIT, Nash deveolped a working thesis on game theory, which ultimately led to the Nobel Prize. But when he was in his early 30's, he descended into mental illness from which he wouldn't ascend until the 1990's.
The biography was written by Sylvia Nasar and was published in 1999. The film, based on the biography, is currently filming and is due for release in December 2001. Russell Crowe plays the role of John Nash and it's directed by Ron Howard.
Sources:http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Cinema/1501//maxcrowe_beautifulmind.html
http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html