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J. Robert Oppenheimer

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is often called the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the first nuclear weapon during World War II.

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Latest News: Oppenheimer Movie Wins 2024 Golden Globe for Best Drama Motion Picture

On January 7, producer Emma Thomas accepted the 2024 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama for Oppenheimer , the 2023 biopic which explores the life of famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project.

The summer blockbuster put the little-known yet highly influential scientist on the map as it grossed more than $950 million at the global box office. You can rent or purchase Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV+ , the Google Play store , Vudu , or YouTube . It’s expected to eventually stream on Peacock , though no plans have been announced.

Watch Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV+ , or Vudu .

Quick Facts

Early life, education, and professorships, the manhattan project, life after the atomic bomb, relationship with jean tatlock, wife and children, oppenheimer in movies and tv, who was j. robert oppenheimer.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer served as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the development of the atomic bomb. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the first nuclear weapon during World War II. After resigning from his post in 1945, he became the chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. Prior to John F. Kennedy ’s assassination in 1963, the president announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award for his achievements in physics. President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him the award that December. The “Father of the Atomic Bomb” died from cancer at the age of 62 in 1967.

FULL NAME: Julius Robert Oppenheimer BORN: April 22, 1904 DIED: February 18, 1967 BIRTHPLACE: New York, New York SPOUSE: Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer (1940-1967) CHILDREN: Peter and Katherine ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City. His German Jewish parents were Julius Oppenheimer, a rich textile importer, and Ella (née Friedman), a painter. Both were immigrants.

After graduating from Harvard University, Oppenheimer sailed to England and enrolled at the University of Cambridge, where he began his atomic research at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1925. Oppenheimer experienced bouts of depression throughout his life, telling his brother Frank: “It is occasionally true that I need physics more than friends.”

Oppenheimer was miserable at Cambridge and found laboratory work uninteresting, preferring theoretical physics rather than experimental, according to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer had such a poor relationship with his Cambridge tutor, Patrick Blackett, that at one point Oppenheimer left an apple doused with noxious chemicals on Blackett’s desk, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life by Abraham Pais and ‎Robert P. Crease. Blackett wasn’t harmed, and Oppenheimer avoided discipline only with the intervention of his parents.

In 1926, he teamed with Max Born at Göttingen University, where he met a host of prominent physicists, including Niels Bohr . He received his doctorate at Göttingen while also developing what became known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, an important contribution to quantum molecular theory.

Oppenheimer held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, and did important research in such fields at theoretical astronomy, nuclear physics, quantum electrodynamics, and more, according to A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and TV Since 1930 by A. Bowdoin Van Riper.

Oppenheimer became politically active in the 1930s and agreed with Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard that the Nazis could develop a nuclear weapon. Following the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, a U.S. Army experiment aimed at harnessing atomic energy for military purposes.

The choice of Oppenheimer surprised some due to his left-wing politics, lack of leadership experience, and the fact he had never won a Nobel Prize. However, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, felt Oppenheimer had an “overweening ambition” that would serve him well in the position, according to Life and Times of the Atomic Bomb by Albert Berger.

Oppenheimer led the scientific end of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, beginning in 1942. The project, which grew from a few hundred people to more than 6,000 by 1945, was populated by many scientists who had escaped fascist regimes in Europe, according to American Prometheus . Their mission was to explore a newly documented fission process involving uranium-235, with which they hoped to make a nuclear bomb before Adolf Hitler could develop one. The project was initially allotted $6,000 by the U.S. government, but by the time the work culminated in 1945, the budget had grown to $2 billion.

The work of Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists led to the world’s first nuclear explosion in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The detonation was given the code name “Trinity,” inspired by a poem by John Donne . While witnessing the explosion, Oppenheimer recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita that read, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,” according to the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists by Robert Jungk. More famously, he later said he also reflected upon another Bhagavad Gita verse: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer was initially pleased with the atomic bomb, with physicist Isidor Rabi saying of him: “I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car. His walk was like High Noon… This kind of strut. He had done it,” according to Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk.

But Oppenheimer’s feelings of elation following Trinity and the bombing of Hiroshima three weeks later changed after the bombing of Nagasaki, which he found unnecessary from a military perspective. During a White House meeting with Harry S. Truman , Oppenheimer famously claimed to have “blood on his hands,” a comment that infuriated the president . Although the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings effectively ended World War II, the weapons’s devastation prompted Oppenheimer to argue against its further development, and he resigned from his post that same year. Ultimately, his work for the Manhattan Project earned him the enduring nickname “father of the atomic bomb.”

The Manhattan Project was top secret until after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Oppenheimer became a household name. He returned to the California Institute of Technology but found he had little desire to each anymore. He went on to become chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949 came earlier than Americans had expected, increasing pressure for the United States to develop the more powerful hydrogen bomb, but Oppenheimer opposed this for practical and ethnical reasons, according to American Prometheus . Truman, however, decided to press forward with the weapon’s development anyway.

Oppenheimer’s shocking opposition to the bomb led to accusations that he was a Communist supporter. In 1954, the AEC held a security hearing regarding Oppenheimer, during which he was suspended from secret nuclear research and stripped of his security clearance. This served as a personal and professional humiliation for Oppenheimer, effectively ending his role in government and policy.

However, his reputation was partially rehabilitated in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David Cassidy. After Kennedy’s assassination , President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the award to Oppenheimer that December.

Oppenheimer continued to support international control of atomic energy in his later years.

Oppenheimer was known for his romantic relationship with Jean Tatlock , a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, while Oppenheimer was a young physics professor there. Tatlock is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical communist politics, something that haunted him later in his career. Although Oppenheimer felt passionately toward Tatlock and reportedly proposed to her twice, they broke up before Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project, and Tatlock died by suicide in January 1944.

In 1939, Oppenheimer met Katherine “Kitty” Puening, a Berkeley student who also had communist ties. The two married in 1940, and they had two children: Peter, who was born in 1941, and Katherine “Toni,” who was born in 1944.

Working as a biologist and botanist, Kitty became an alcoholic after her husband became a celebrity for his role in the Manhattan Project, according to American Prometheus . Kitty died of an embolism in 1972 years after Oppenheimer’s own death.

A chain smoker, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.

In December 2022, 55 years after Oppenheimer’s death, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm nullified the 1954 decision to revoke his national security clearance.

Oppenheimer has been portrayed in several films, plays, and other works of media. A BBC television serial Oppenheimer was released in 1980, starring Sam Waterston as the famed physicist. It won three BAFTA Television Awards. That year also saw the release of The Day After Trinity , a documentary about Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won a Peabody Award.

Dwight Schultz portrayed Oppenheimer in the film Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), and David Strathairn played him in the television movie Day One , also released in 1989. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan directs 2023’s Oppenheimer movie, in which Cillian Murphy plays the famed physicist.

• I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
• If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
• Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer: 5 Facts About the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’

By: Becky Little

Published: June 20, 2023

J. Robert Oppenheimer is known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in creating the first nuclear weapon during World War II . The theoretical physicist was director of the Manhattan Project ’s secret Los Alamos Laboratory, which created the bombs that killed an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer obtained his Ph.D. in physics when he was only 23. After this, he taught physics at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1942, General Leslie Groves Jr. asked Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project despite concerns about Oppenheimer’s lack of managerial experience and Nobel Prizes (something many of the other possible candidates had). After the war, Oppenheimer served on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he argued for more oversight regarding the use of nuclear weapons and opposed the construction of the hydrogen bomb.

Here are some things you might not know about the famous physicist.

1. He studied Sanskrit and read Hindu scripture

Oppenheimer’s most famous quote comes from the 1965 documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb . In it, Oppenheimer recalls seeing the first nuclear bomb test on July 16, 1945:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita : Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Oppenheimer had a personal interest in Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hindu scripture. He studied the language while teaching at Berkeley, and read the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. When he quoted the Bhagavad Gita in 1965, he was giving his own English translation of the text. There are other ways to translate this line, and its meaning—as well as what Oppenheimer was trying to convey by quoting it— is complex .

2. He first fell in love with New Mexico when he was convalescing there as a teen.

In 1942, Oppenheimer chose the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico as the site for the Manhattan Project’s secret laboratory. It met many of the requirements needed for the project (for example, it was relatively isolated but still near a train track), and it was also in a part of the country Oppenheimer had fallen in love with when he was a teenager.

After graduating from high school, Oppenheimer was at first unable to enroll in Harvard University because he was sick with a severe case of dysentery. His parents sent him to a dude ranch in New Mexico to convalesce for the summer, and it was during his time there that he gained an appreciation for the desert and a love of horseback riding.

He returned to New Mexico multiple times over the next couple of decades, eventually selecting the desert Los Alamos ranch as the site for the Manhattan Project’s secret scientist town.

3. He became interested in communism during the Great Depression

The Great Depression helped fuel an interest in workers’ rights and communism in the United States. During the late 1930s, Oppenheimer attended events supporting leftist causes, donated to the anti-fascist Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and subscribed to the leftist newspaper People’s World . He never officially joined the U.S. Communist Party, but many people in his life did—including his brother, Frank Oppenheimer; his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock; and his wife, Katherine “Kitty” Puening.

Even though the United States joined the side of the Soviet Union when it entered World War II, conservative U.S. officials were still suspicious of alleged communists. During the first Red Scare from 1917 to 1920, officials persecuted anyone suspected of communism, socialism, anarchism or any pro-worker activity. Leslie Groves Jr., the Army general who selected Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project’s laboratory, was aware of Oppenheimer’s communist associations but didn’t consider them a major problem.

After the war, Oppenheimer’s opponents used these associations to smear him as a security threat.

4. He was blacklisted during the 1950s Red Scare and lost his security clearance

In 1946, the United States formed the Atomic Energy Commission to oversee the country’s nuclear weapons program. Oppenheimer used his position on this commission to argue for more control of nuclear weapons and against the development of the hydrogen bomb, which the United States tested for the first time in 1952.

“He was opposed to pursuing the hydrogen bomb, the ‘superbomb,’ because that was 1,000 times more powerful than [the bombs dropped on] Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” says Cynthia C. Kelly, founder and president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation . Oppenheimer was worried about the potential destruction that an arms race to build bigger and bigger bombs would unleash.

Businessman Lewis Strauss, who became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953, disliked Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and held a security hearing to investigate Oppenheimer’s loyalty. This was at the height of the second Red Scare, when Senator Joseph McCarthy held hearings to expose supposed communists in the federal government.

With the help of the FBI , which illegally tapped Oppenheimer’s phone, the Atomic Energy Commission argued during the hearing that Oppenheimer’s association with communists made him a security threat. In 1954, the government revoked his security clearance, making him one of the many people to be blacklisted during that era.

5. Over 50 years after his death, the United States vacated the security clearance decision

With the revocation of his security clearance, Oppenheimer could no longer serve on the Atomic Energy Commission.

“Once his security clearance was denied in 1954, that ended his career as an advisor to the government of the United States,” says David A. Hollinger , a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley and coeditor of Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections .

Even though President John F. Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award for scientific achievement and leadership in 1963, Oppenheimer never regained his security clearance. He continued to speak and write about physics and nuclear technology until his death in 1967 at age 62.

It wasn’t until December 2022 that the U.S. Department of Energy vacated the decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance and officially acknowledged that his hearing had been unfair. This was a decision that scientists and historians had long supported and called on the U.S. government to make. (It may have been sped along by the fact that the movie Oppenheimer was scheduled to debut that summer.)

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Who is Oppenheimer? The controversial man behind the atomic bomb

Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film tells the story of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the legendary physicist who developed the bomb. Did he really live to regret it?

New scientific discoveries can ignite curiosity, explain the unknown, and even improve the world. But what happens when a scientist comes to regret the knowledge he’s unleashed?

This is the central question of the upcoming film Oppenheimer , which recounts American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s moonshot project to build an atomic bomb in a top-secret lab in the New Mexico desert—and his lifelong qualms about the nuclear age he ushered in.

Did the legendary physicist really regret his nuclear creation? The truth is as complicated as the science behind the bomb. Here’s how Oppenheimer birthed—and questioned—the atomic bomb.

( How the advent of nuclear weapons changed the course of history .)

From child prodigy to the Manhattan Project

Born in New York City in 1904, Julius Robert Oppenheimer was the son of German Jewish immigrants who found wealth in the textile importing trade. He graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude   after just three years of study, then studied theoretical physics at both Cambridge University and the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he gained his doctorate at age 23.

The young physicist “Oppie” had soon rubbed shoulders with the greatest scientific figures of his age, and his academic work advanced quantum theory and predicted everything from the neutron to the black hole. He was a voracious learner outside of the sciences, too, learning Sanskrit, studying religion, and aligning himself with a variety of progressive causes.

For Hungry Minds

After the United States joined the Allies in 1941, Oppenheimer was asked to participate in the top-secret Manhattan Project , whose aim was to develop an atomic weapon. As he endeavored to figure out what would need to happen to trigger and sustain the kind of neutron-chain reaction needed to create a nuclear explosion, Oppenheimer’s superiors were impressed by his wide-ranging knowledge, ambition, and ability to work with, and inspire, other scientists. In 1942, the U.S. Army called on Oppenheimer to head up the secret lab where the bomb would be tested.

( The devastating legacy of U.S. nuclear tests still lingers today .)

Los Alamos and the Trinity test

As Army officials scouted appropriate places for such a lab, Oppenheimer, who loved the American Southwest and owned a ranch in New Mexico, suggested the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private boys’ school near Santa Fe. Soon, he oversaw hundreds, then thousands, of workers at what became known as the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Oppenheimer didn’t just assemble a group of the most brilliant scientific minds of his time—he inspired, goaded, organized, and pushed them to perform. “He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step,” physicist Victor Weisskopf later recalled . That presence resulted in “a unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge”—and in a chain reaction of scientific discoveries that produced the world’s first nuclear weapon.

On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer and others gathered at the Trinity test site south of Los Alamos for the world’s first attempted nuclear blast. It was a tense moment: the scientists knew that the bomb they’d nicknamed “Gadget” would shape the future of the world.

But they also believed it might bring an end to World War II. Though the war in Europe had ended, U.S. officials feared the war’s bloodiest phase was still ahead of them: assaults against Japan itself. The hope was that the nation could force Japan to surrender instead by threatening to use the new weapon.

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Conducted in secret, the test worked. As Oppenheimer later recounted in a 1965 interview, the moment had called to mind a line from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita : “Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Bombing Japan—and the moral aftermath

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped two of the bombs Oppenheimer had helped develop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A minimum of 110,000 people are thought to have been killed in the blasts, which wiped out both cities on a scale of devastation never seen before or since.

( ‘A ball of blinding light’: Atomic bomb survivors share their stories .)

Oppenheimer had served on the scientific committee that recommended the War Department deploy the bomb as soon as possible against Japan. Historical debates still rage about whether the government listened to scientists’ pleas that the bomb be deployed against military targets only, or even publicly tested beforehand in an attempt to force Japan’s surrender.

The night of the Hiroshima bombing, Oppenheimer was cheered by a crowd of fellow scientists at Los Alamos, and declared that his only regret was that the bomb hadn’t been finished in time to use against Germany.

But though they were thrilled by their accomplishment, the scientists were horrified at the loss of civilian lives in the attack, worrying that the future of the weapons would encourage future wars instead of deter them. A few weeks after the bombing, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the Secretary of War warning that “the safety of this nation…cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

But Oppenheimer also defended the Manhattan Project and the bomb he’d been tasked with building, arguing that it had been necessary to fully understand the possibilities of nuclear science.

Opposition to the hydrogen bomb

Nonetheless, Oppenheimer spent much of his life after the war lobbying for nuclear deterrence, vocally opposing U.S. attempts to develop a more powerful hydrogen bomb after the U.S.S.R. made strides with its own bomb. Instead, said Oppenheimer, the U.S. should consider using nuclear weapons only tactically and pursue other uses of nuclear technology, like generating power, instead.

( What is nuclear energy—and is it a viable resource? )

This earned him political enemies—and put him the crosshairs of the Red Scare, an American political era of anti-Communist hysteria during the Cold War. At a 1954 hearing looking into his supposed Communist sympathies, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance. The move was only reversed in 2022 , after government officials revisited Oppenheimer’s case and found the investigation had been flawed and unlawful.

“He doesn't slot into easy categories of pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or anything like that,” historian Alex Wellerstein told PBS NewsHour . “He's a tricky figure.”

Oppenheimer never returned to government service, instead founding the World Academy of Arts and Sciences and lecturing on science and ethics until his death in 1967. Though he had helped create the “necessary” weapon that ended a war, destroyed two entire cities, and ushered in a dangerous new age, he lobbied against nuclear proliferation for the rest of his life.

“In some crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish,” he said in 1950 , “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

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J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Grandson on What the Movie Gets Right and the One Scene He Would Have Changed

M oviegoers turned out in droves this weekend for writer-director Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer , fueling an expectations-shattering domestic box office debut of $80 million . The three-hour-long biopic recounts the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and has been praised by critics for its nuanced examination of a complicated historical figure.

The movie is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , one of numerous accounts of Oppenheimer's life and legacy. But according to Oppenheimer's grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, the famous physicist's family has their own their own approach to depictions of him and additional nuance to include.

Charles was born near Santa Fe, N.M., in April 1975, after both his grandfather and grandmother, Katherine "Kitty" Puening Oppenheimer (played by Emily Blunt), had passed away. However, he says he grew up having a very open dialogue about his grandfather's work with his father, Peter Oppenheimer, who spent several years of his early childhood at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

TIME spoke with Charles about what Oppenheimer gets right about his grandfather, what he would have changed, and the work he's doing to further Oppenheimer's legacy today.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TIME: How was your grandparents' story told to you when you were growing up?

Charles Oppenheimer: Like most kids, I heard about my grandparents through my parents, and there was a marker at one point that stands out in my memory of speaking about Robert Oppenheimer being a famous person who had done his duty during World War II. He might have been a soldier, but his skills were in science, so he used science to do what he had to do during the war. But within the family, we had very open conversations. So my dad was always there if I had a question once I started hearing more about how we were related to a person that other people were talking about. I was always able to initiate a conversation and I do that to this day, especially with my father Peter.

So there was ongoing, open communication about who your grandfather was.

With a very big dividing line. Within the family, we absolutely talked about it as much as possible. With anyone outside of the family, my father doesn't discuss anything [about him] if he can avoid it.

Do you feel there are misconceptions about your grandfather?

There's such an incredible historical record of him. It's impressive, like every detail of every conversation of his spring break in 1924 is analyzed. If you have that much information and enough people writing and rewriting and interpreting, you can pick up any thread of meaning and narrative. The one that's developing right now is about as positive and as famous of an interpretation of him as you could have. And I find that being related to him and having insight into who he was doesn't always seem that interesting to other people. They're happy to ask a historian or a writer, and it's not necessarily true that my impression of his values is taken as the answer. So I kind of struggle with saying that I have a view of who he is and what he cared about and it not always getting across. That being said, I think with as much attention as is put on him, there is a large understanding of the complexity of the stuff he dealt with and the problems and opportunities of ushering science into the world.

Read more: Here's How Faithfully Oppenheimer Captures Its Subject's Real Life

You saw the movie. Were there parts that hit you the hardest, emotionally?

I was bracing myself for not feeling great about it, even though I talked to Chris Nolan and was very impressed by him. I saw him work on the set with an amazing intensity when I visited once or twice, and we had a great conversation. But I didn't know, am I going to love it? Am I going to hate it? I often have that reaction to biographies and pundits when they talk about my grandfather. I feel like they're missing something. And sometimes it really feels personal. Like when somebody wants to start a fight with you on the schoolyard, they'll talk about your family member. But during the movie, I found myself accepting and liking it. I thought it told a compelling story and I could just take it as art that was really engaging. I was really happy to have that reaction. I didn't expect it.

Were there parts that struck you as historically or emotionally inaccurate?

When I talked to Chris Nolan, at one point he said something roughly like, 'I know how to tell a story out of this subject. There are going to be parts that you have to dramatize a bit and parts that are changed. As family members, I think you're going to like some parts and dislike some parts.' That's probably led into my acceptance of the movie, even though I saw it very late, just when it came out. As a dramatized representation of the history, it was really largely accurate. There are parts that I disagree with, but not really because of Nolan.

The part I like the least is this poison apple reference, which was a problem in American Prometheus . If you read American Prometheus carefully enough, the authors say, 'We don't really know if it happened.' There's no record of him trying to kill somebody. That's a really serious accusation and it's historical revision. There's not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true. American Prometheus got it from some references talking about a spring break trip, and all the original reporters of that story—there was only two maybe three—reported that they didn't know what Robert Oppenheimer was talking about. Unfortunately, American Prometheus summarizes that as Robert Oppenheimer tried to kill his teacher and then they [acknowledge that] maybe there's this doubt.

Sometimes facts get dragged through a game of telephone. In the movie, it's treated vaguely and you don't really know what's going on unless you know this incredibly deep backstory. So it honestly didn't bother me. It bothers me that it was in the biography with that emphasis, not a disclaimer of, this is an unsubstantiated rumor that we want to put in our book to make it interesting. But I like some of the dramatization. I thought Einstein's conversation with Oppenheimer at the end was really effective even though it wasn't historical.

What was your role, if any, in the movie?

The family policy around media, books, and what I'd call the cult of Oppenheimer, is not to participate in it. It's a business to write and talk about Oppenheimer, and the model that my dad chose is: 'It's not very classy, and I'm not going to be involved in publicly representing Oppenheimer in ways that other people do as a business.' But when I saw this movie was coming out, I said, 'Wow, that's going to be really big.' I also have a big interest in representing my grandfather's values for today's world. That's the most important thing in my opinion. So I reached out said, 'Hey, could I get involved?', and Chris Nolan was nice enough to give me a courtesy call through Kai Bird—whose book I just criticized. I do think American Prometheus is really good, I just had a complaint about that one part.

So Chris Nolan gave me a call. He had finished the script and he said, 'I have so much material with American Prometheus .' I explained that my dad probably would be unlikely to talk. But I don't think he needed input from the family. And as an artist, he obviously has every right to do that. You need art to tell this story. And it's just a fact that when somebody writes a biography about our family, we don't have input or the ability to make decisions. The chain of this movie was American Prometheus was published and then Nolan licensed it. I tried to give my perspective, but there wasn't any official involvement.

Is there anything you would have advised them to do differently, had you been asked?

I definitely would have removed the apple thing. But I can't imagine myself giving advice about movie stuff to Nolan. He's an expert, he's the artist, and he's a genius in this area. But one amusing family story is that, if I invited myself to the set, they would entertain me coming, which I did twice. And so one time I visited the set in New Mexico. I saw them film and, in that particular scene, Cillian Murphy walks into a room and part of his line was calling someone an 'asshole.' And when I went back to Santa Fe and told my dad, he was horrified. He said, 'Robert Oppenheimer never swore. He was such a formal person. He would never, ever do that.' And I was like, 'Well, it's a dramatization.' But I was worried that in the movie he would be this swearing, abusive guy. Anyway, I think he said one swear word in the movie and I just happened to be in the room. So there is a chance that if we had been consultants, we could have added some details and depth. But there's such a complete record. It was enough for Nolan to tell the story he intended to.

Did the movie help you come to any kind of deeper understanding of your grandfather?

When I saw how Nolan put this together, I was like, wow, there are thousands of pages of more details than what he put in there. But he was able to summarize it to the effect of: are we going to destroy ourselves as a species? That told as a story is really important. It's not exactly a revelation, but it's an important message. I always look at my grandfather's actual words instead of what other people said about him. And I think his advice is really relevant today, because he was right about how to manage atomic energy. If we had followed his actual hard policy proposals, we could have avoided an arms race right after World War II.

Robert Oppenheimer saw where we should go and he was right at that time. That really counts for a lot. It's not just the fact of like, ‘Oh, I regret something I did.' He put in effort to affect policy that could have literally changed history, and being overruled and discredited, which is what Nolan tells the story of, is important in that light. The way he told this story through [Lewis] Strauss’ perspective was really masterful.

There have always been two facts in tension: on the one hand, Oppenheimer helped create a weapon of mass destruction that was used to kill hundreds of thousands of people . On the other hand, the existence of nuclear weapons has succeeded as a deterrent for nearly 80 years, with superpowers like the U.S., Russia, and China avoiding war for fear of what would happen if those weapons again got into play. What are your thoughts on that complex legacy?

To me, that's the most interesting part and the most relevant today. The movie, while really good, had less emphasis than I would have put on the period of 1945 right before the bomb dropped to 1947, which was the time where we could have avoided an arms race. It is true that he ushered these weapons in, and then we went into an arms race, and we haven't destroyed ourselves. But the difference is him and [Niels] Bohr saw the arms race coming and said, ‘We really must avoid this.' It's not good enough that we just haven't died yet. It was a disaster that we got into an arms race and it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of science, as illustrated in the scene they have in there with Truman where Oppenheimer had been telling people that if we don't co-manage this with our allies, which were the U.K. and Russia at the time, we're going to get into an arms race and it's going to be extremely dangerous.

The gut reaction from Truman and others was, let's just make as many of these bombs as fast as possible and we'll keep it secret and the Russians will never get the bomb. So you have a scientific expert that's telling the government, this is what we need to do, and you have the government doing the opposite. We got into an arms race not because of a hard-nosed, pragmatic understanding of we need to build these bombs, but a scientific misunderstanding that we could keep it secret. Robert Oppenheimer's deepest message is that the world had changed around the atomic bomb dropping. But it wasn't just atomic bombs, it was the fact that the scope of our technologies had increased to the point where we could destroy ourselves and we had to unite in a new way. And that's exactly what he said: Mankind must unite or we will perish. That's the message that we can bring into today's world.

You started the Oppenheimer Project to continue your grandfather's work today. Can you tell me a little bit about what the organization does?

Even though I spent a lot of time in this interview trying to correct some historical detail, you never win that discussion. But if you look at Robert Oppenheimer's values, what he wrote, what he said, how he led scientists, it’s clearly an amazing record. He led scientists to solve a hugely difficult technical problem under the threat of existential risk. And then he talked about, how do we manage the outcome of improving science and technology at that speed? He had a poetic way of talking. So when he spoke about what should we do about it, it wasn't just an engineered answer. He had a really deep, rounded view of it because of his education and interest. And what he said was, we need to unite in a new way—and his policy tried to put that in place.

It's exactly what we need to do today in the world. We can draw dots between the idea that if we hadn't gone into an arms race, we would have actually been able to use that scientific discovery for abundant nuclear energy . The same science could have made unlimited energy. We had a little bit of a push there of making it, but we were making bombs constantly at the same time, and that eventually sabotaged the public acceptance of nuclear energy. Now, we've gotten carbon output and climate change. So if we could use the idea of ushering in technology in an industrial scale effort to affect a really threatening problem, like climate change and lack of enough energy, we could apply the same type of effort that we had in the Manhattan Project towards today's problems. And it wouldn’t include creating a bunch of bombs, because that method of warfare stopped working in 1945. It doesn't work. Our institutions haven't caught up with that insight.

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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Toni Oppenheimer

Translator princeton, nj, los alamos, nm, family member of manhattan project veteran.

Katherine “Toni” Oppenheimer (1944-1977) was an American translator, and the daughter of J. Robert Oppenheimer .

Toni Oppenheimer was one of the many children born at Los Alamos.  When J. Robert Oppenheimer became the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Oppenheimer family moved with him to New Jersey. Toni was 3 years old at the time. A few years later, she was enrolled at the Miss Fine’s School in Princeton, where she was an exemplary student. She was a shy girl who was admired for her level headedness. That emotional maturity made her the rock of a household that was frequently unstable.  

As a child, she was diagnosed with polio. The family brought her on a trip to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to help her recovery. As she recovered from polio, she also developed an attachment to the secluded Caribbean island, beginning a lifelong relationship with the area.

Relationships with Her Parents

Robert Strunsky, who was a friend of the Oppenheimer family during their time in Princeton, was quite blunt about the unusual circumstances faced by the Oppenheimer children. He said that “to be a child of Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer is to have one of the greatest handicaps in the world.” Toni and her brother Peter were both certainly impacted by their parents’ unique eccentricities.

In particular, it was difficult for Toni to maintain a healthy relationship with her mother. After serving as the family’s sturdy voice of reason for much of her childhood, she began to feel immense pressure. After years of dutifully obeying her mother, picking up cigarettes and drinks for her around the house, Toni began to rebel as a teenager. Sis Frank, who lived near the family’s cottage on St. John, recalled that “Toni and her mother were at each other’s throats all the time.”

She also had a complicated relationship with her father. Though he recovered from the stressful environment at Los Alamos to become a very loving father, there are mixed accounts of his ability to actually communicate with either of his children. While some family friends thought that Oppenheimer did not pay enough attention to his daughter, others saw their relationship as very loving. What is known is that Robert’s death deeply unseated her mental health.

Later Years and Suicide

Robert Oppenheimer died of cancer in 1967. Soon after, in 1969, Toni Oppenheimer was denied a position as a translator for the United Nations because the FBI refused to grant her a security clearance. That process dredged up many of the communist charges that had been leveled at her father fifteen years before. Toni found herself unable to completely recover from the two events.

Soon after losing out on the U.N. position, and after two unsuccessful marriages, Toni permanently relocated to St. John. She became a recluse in her family’s old cottage, with few friends on the remote island. She committed suicide in January, 1977, a month after her 32nd birthday.

For more information on Toni Oppenheimer’s life, read  Ameri can Prometheus  by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin .

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.

It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time .

This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron , and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “ Dunkirk ” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Oppenheimer Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

An earlier version of this article misidentified J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Manhattan Project. He was director of its clandestine weapons laboratory, Los Alamos.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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J. Robert Oppenheimer's kids and grandkids: Where are they now?

In July, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” premiered in theaters, and viewers got an intimate look at J. Robert Oppenheimer’s journey to developing the atomic bomb. But the film also showed another side of the famed physicist, as both a romantic partner and a father. 

The three-hour movie, which has garnered eight Golden Globes nominations , explores the relationship Oppenheimer had with Jean Tatlock , a woman known to be his lover before her untimely death, as well as his marriage to Katherine “Kitty” Puening. Oppenheimer and Puening had two children: a son, Peter, and a daughter, Toni.

Here's everything you need to know about Oppenheimer's two children and what has happened in the 56 years since their father's death.

Peter Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer's first child, Peter Oppenheimer, was born in 1941 while he was teaching at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley.

Peter moved with his parents to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1942 when his father was appointed the director of the Manhattan Project , code name for the governmental project to develop an atomic bomb during World War II.

After the war, Oppenheimer and his family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he served as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Peter was sent to an elite Quaker boarding school, the George School, in Newtown, Pennsylvania, but he eventually graduated from Princeton High School, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation .

After graduating, he spent time with Oppenheimer's brother, Frank Oppenheimer, at his ranch in Colorado, according to the AHF. Soon after his father died, Peter permanently moved to northern New Mexico to live at a residence his father had purchased years earlier, the Perro Caliente ranch, according to the AHF.

According to the AHF, Peter still lives in New Mexico working as a carpenter and has three children: Dorothy, Charles and Ella.

Katherine 'Toni' Oppenheimer

Katherine "Toni" Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer's second child, was born in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, while her father and other scientists worked on developing the atomic bomb. She attended school in Princeton, New Jersey, when her father was the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, according to the AHF .

Toni was diagnosed with polio as a child, and her family brought her on a trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands to help her recovery, according to the AHF. She developed a lifelong attachment to the islands, and would later return there as an adult.

In 1969, two years after her father's death, Toni was denied a position as a translator for the United Nations because the FBI would not give her a security clearance. Her father had his security clearance revoked 15 years earlier following a security investigation after he was accused of having communist ties.

Toni permanently moved to her family's cottage on the U.S. Virgin Islands after the U.N. ordeal, and died by suicide in January 1977, a month after her 32nd birthday, according to the AHF.

Where are Oppenheimer's grandchildren now?

Peter Oppenheimer had three children. Two of them live public lives and comment on their grandfather's legacy.

Dr. Dorothy Oppenheimer Vanderford, is a technical writer based in southern Nevada, where she works for the Nevada National Security Site , another nuclear testing facility.

Speaking to News 3LV, Vanderford said her family did not contribute to the making of the movie. After seeing "Oppenheimer," she felt "positive about it." She called her grandfather, whom she never met, a "real patriot."

Charles Oppenheimer works in software and writes op-eds about nuclear power , in light of his grandfather's work. His Twitter bio says he represents the "family of J. Robert Oppenheimer." He has two children, per his website .

In an interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer's biographer, Dorothy Vanderford spoke about living in New Mexico, and how that connects the generations.

"It gave me an appreciation for self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and I absolutely trusted my Dad in all areas to take care of us. When we would be driving through really deep snow and getting stuck, he could get us out of any kind of jam. I learned a lot about how to live on land and in nature. I absolutely appreciate that. I think that is something that’s passed down through my family, from Robert Oppenheimer, through to my Dad, to me. In my case, it may be ending with me," she said.

Anna Kaplan is a news and trending reporter for TODAY.com.

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Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

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Engineering 'Oppenheimer'

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• Trivia In order for the black and white sections of the movie to be shot in the same quality as the rest of the film, Kodak produced a limited supply of its Double-X black and white film stock in 70mm. This film stock was chosen specifically for its heritage - it was originally sold to photographers as Super-XX during World War II and was very popular with photojournalists of the era.
• Goofs The stop signs are yellow in the film, which is accurate. The United States used yellow stop signs until 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer : Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...

Albert Einstein : I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer : I believe we did.

• Alternate versions To get a U/A rating certification in India, the movie was edited to remove or censor all nudity using CGI. For example, the scene where Tatlock and Oppenheimer have a conversation and the former character was topless, the nudity was censored with a CGI black dress. Many Middle Eastern countries use this exact same censored version for release.
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Meet the real J. Robert Oppenheimer's family, including his wife Kitty, his 2 children, and his grandchildren

• Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan 's "Oppenheimer."
• It explores how the scientist created the world's first atomic bomb.
• Oppenheimer had a wife and two children. He has three grandchildren, and at least two great-grandchildren.

Christopher Nolan's latest movie , "Oppenheimer," sees Irish actor Cillian Murphy play J. Robert Oppenheimer , the man responsible for leading the Manhattan Project and creating the atomic bomb for the United States during World War II.

He's famously known for quoting the Hindu text, "The Bhagavad Gita," following the nuclear weapons test, saying: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." But he later resigned from the Manhattan Project shortly after the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan . 

The film was met with huge critical acclaim, earning five awards at the 2024 Golden Globes , including best picture. It also won seven awards at the 2024 BAFTAS, with Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. taking home awards for best actor and best supporting actor, respectively.

As well as Oppenheimer's nuclear work, the film looks at the scientist's complex personal life, including his marriage to Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, née Puening.

Here's everything you need to know about the real Oppenheimer's family.

Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer was married three times before she married Oppenheimer.

Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, née Puening, married the scientist in 1940, only two years before he joined the Manhattan Project.

Kitty had been married three times before, as she wed musician Frank Ramseyer in 1932 before their marriage was annulled in 1933. 

Shortly afterward, in 1934, she was involved with the Communist Party of America, and became John Dullet Jr.'s. common-law wife when they lived together in Chicago, before separating in 1936.

Kitty then married Oxford doctor Richard Stewart Harrison in 1938, but had an affair with Oppenheimer while Harrison was working in California. She divorced Harrison in 1940, and married Oppenheimer a day later. 

They remained married until Oppenheimer's death from throat cancer in 1967, and Kitty scattered his ashes into the water by the island of St. John in the Virgin Islands, where they had spent plenty of time with their children, Peter and Toni.

Kitty spent the rest of her life with Robert Serber, another physicist from the Manhattan Project, whose wife had died by suicide. Kitty died in hospital in 1972, just as the pair had set out to go sailing to Japan, the Galapagos Islands, and Tahiti.

Peter Oppenheimer still lives on his father's ranch in New Mexico.

Kitty and Robert's oldest child Peter was born in Pasadena, California, in 1941, before the family moved to Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project.

According to the Nuclear Museum , Peter struggled with anxiety as a child, and didn't have a good relationship with his mother. 

His father's secretary, Verna Hobson, became something of a "surrogate mother" instead. Unfortunately, Peter didn't do well at the Quaker school in Newtown, Pennsylvania, he went to, and didn't get the grades he needed to graduate.

He eventually finished his education at a public high school. 

When his father died in 1967, Peter moved back to the Perro Caliente ranch in New Mexico that Robert owned, and still lives there at the age of 81. He's worked as a carpenter over the years, and has three children.

Katherine "Toni" Oppenheimer died in 1977.

Toni Oppenheimer was born in 1944 and was brought up at Los Alamos, but went to school in Princeton, New Jersey, after her father landed the job as director of the Institute for Advanced Study and moved the family.

Toni had polio when she was young, which is largely why the family started visiting St. John in the Virgin Islands — because the warmth helped her condition.

As per the Nuclear Museum , Toni didn't get on well with her mother when she was a teenager – largely because of Kitty's reliance on alcohol. 

Two years after Robert's death in 1967, Toni was rejected from a role in the United Nations as a translator. She struggled to cope with losing her father, and her job, and after living on the island of St. John for a while, she died by suicide in January 1977, just a month after she turned 32.

Peter Oppenheimer had three children: Charles Oppenheimer, Dorothy Vanderford, and Ella Oppenheimer.

Although Toni didn't have any children before her death, Peter Oppenheimer has three: Charles, Ella, and Dorothy. 

Dorothy Vanderford, who was born in 1973, is Oppenheimer's oldest grandchild, and currently works at the Nevada National Security Site as a technical writer, following in her grandfather's scientific footsteps.

She spoke to KSNV about the film, and said that Christopher Nolan didn't consult the family about making his movie.

"They did not reach out to us and the family did not contribute to the creation of the movie or the narrative," she said. "It's an artistic project that Nolan is doing on his own terms. I'm excited at this point that the movie is coming out. I actually was able to preview it last night and I overall feel positive about it."

She added: "There were a few things that I didn't agree with and didn't like, but overall I felt like it was a good movie."

Little is known about Ella, but Charles was born in 1975, and has worked in developing software for most of his life. He also describes himself as an entrepreneur.

Both Dorothy and Charles took part in a lengthy interview in 2015 about their grandfather for the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

At the time, Charles pointed out that many historians find his grandfather a mysterious figure, but his life is "a fascinating story."

"In particular, people are having a hard time pinning down who this guy was. I guess it's made it difficult to deal with for the family, for some people. Not for me," he said.

Charles has two daughters with his wife, Karen Pak Oppenheimer, which means that Oppenheimer has at least two great-grandchildren.

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