In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) is portrayed as a tortured genius that often rubs people up the wrong way. He is also, as Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) accuses him of, a womaniser.

We know Oppenheimer eventually married Kitty (Emily Blunt) and that the pair had two children, Peter and Katherine, together but in the film he’s also shown to have a passionate affair with a woman called Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). But who was she, and what happened to her?

Tatlock’s early life

Tatlock was born in 1914 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was the daughter of an esteemed English professor. Growing up, she attended prestigious schools like Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and Vassar College. After graduating in 1935, she moved to Berkeley to go to Stanford Medical School and later graduated to become a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

While in Berkeley, she began writing for the Western Worker, a newspaper for the Communist Party of America. A year later in 1936, aged 22, she met Oppenheimer for the first time.

Meeting Oppenheimer

At the time, Oppenheimer was the 32-year-old professor of physics at Berkeley, and when his landlady had a party to raise funds for the Communist-backed Spanish Republicans, their two orbits collided.

According to Streshinsky and Klaus’s An Atomic Love Story, the couple had a “passionate” affair, and although Tatlock in part introduced Oppenheimer to radical politics, it’s unlikely that she made him translate the famous “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds” from Sanskrit while they were having sex, as shown in the film.

Streshinsky and Klaus also states that Oppenheimer proposed to Tatlock twice – Oppenheimer himself said in one of his security hearings: “We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged” – but the same book also posits that Tatlock struggled with her sexuality, as she wrote to a friend once: “There was a period when I thought I was homosexual. I still am, in a way, forced to believe it, but really, logically, I am sure that I can't be because of my un-masculinity.”

Oppenheimer married Kitty in November 1940, but he and Tatlock still saw each other several times. There’s a difference of opinion as to what happened when Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos to start the Manhattan Project; some say he continued an ongoing affair with her, while others think he saw her just one last time in Berkeley, in June 1943.

The couple had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, then went back to her apartment (trailed by US agents, who had him under surveillance) and according to Smith and Weiner’s Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, she told him she loved him and wanted to be with him, but he declined, and it was the last time they saw each other.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Her death

Tatlock struggled with clinical depression throughout her life and while she was getting treatment for it, on January 4, 1944, she took her own life. The formal inquest returned a verdict of suicide, and an autopsy showed that she had ingested barbiturates and the sedative chloral hydrate and drowned in the bath. She was found by her father, who also discovered a note she had left which read: “I am disgusted with everything... To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn't... I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health or suicidal thoughts, contact Samaritans on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org

Laura Martin is a freelance journalist  specializing in pop culture.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK571KRmnK2cqcKzsY6foKWlX5aBdYKPcG5vaF%2BstbB51pqqZqKVlrtuwMCto6ibm2Q%3D