Behind every icon is a flesh-and-blood life.

¹While I was a teenager growing up in New Rochelle, New York, I had up on my bulletin board a photo of Marie Curie sitting under an elm tree, her arms wrapped around her daughters, two-year-old Eve and nine-year-old Irene.

²I didn't know very much about Curie beyond the basics: She and her husband had discovered radioactivity.

³She was the first person to win two Nobel prizes.

⁴She was brilliant, single-minded, a legend.

⁵I was just a girl with little direction, more drawn to words and made-up stories than to formulas and lab experiments.

¹Looking back, I think I admired that photo so much, not because of Marie Curie and what she stood for but because she seemed so exotic—or maybe because of how her arms encircled her girls.

²My own mother lay in the hospital, recovering from a grave injury in a car crash.

³I wanted her to hold me, but she couldn't.

⁴So, instead, I idolized Marie, who in my mind became the strongest and most capable woman in the world.

¹Like any girl's fantasy, mine contained at least a shred of truth.

²Marie Curie's own daughters grew into accomplished women in their own right, though their mother was obsessively engaged in her research before they were born.

³Curie was what we might today call a super-competent multi-tasker: Her work revolutionized the study of atomic energy and radioactivity, and she's one of a pitiful few female scientists whom schoolchildren ever study.

⁴Also she was a woman driven by passions, fighting battles much of her life with what a doctor now would probably diagnose as severe depression.

⁵In the end, her most brilliant discovery proved fatal for both her and her husband.

¹When Curie was 10 years old, in 1878, her mother died of tuberculosis.

²The Polish girl then known as Manya Sklodowska carried on with her schoolwork as if nothing had happened, but for months she'd find places to hide so she could cry her eyes out.

¹At age 18, she landed a job as governess to a wealthy family near Warsaw.

²She wound up falling in love with Casimir Zorawski, an accomplished student of 19 with whom she shared a love of nature and science.

³But when Casimir announced that he and Manya wanted to marry, his father threatened to disinherit him.

⁴She was beneath his station, poor, a common nursemaid.

⁵Definitely no.

⁶Four years dragged by.

⁷Finally, Manya told Casimir, "If you cannot decide, I cannot decide for you."

⁸In what still seems to me a remarkable act of courage, Manya then gathered her meager savings and took a train to Paris, where she changed her name, enrolled at the Sorbonne—and walked into history.

¹In 1893, she became the first woman to earn a degree in physics at the Sorbonne.

²If you have ever seen the 1943 film Madame Curie, you know the broad brush strokes of her early experiments to find a mysterious, hidden new element.

³There's a scene in which actress Greer Garson, as Marie, stirs a boiling vat, her face glistening with sweat.

⁴Late at night, Marie and her husband, Pierre, enter the lab to see a tiny luminous stain congealed in a dish.

⁵"Oh, Pierre!

⁶Could it be?"

⁷exclaims Marie as tears roll down her cheeks.

⁸Yes, this was it—radium!

¹The reality was a lot grittier—and a lot less romantic.

²Marie and Pierre, whom she married in 1895, did indeed work side by side late into the night.

³But their lab was so shabby and dank that their daughter Irene, at age three, called it "that sad, sad place."

⁴And one prominent scientist said that had he not seen the worktable, he would have thought he was in a stable.

¹In time, the Curies became world famous, especially after they won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 for the discovery of radioactivity.

²They were the toast of the European scientific community, feted lavishly and visited at home in Paris by acolytes who came from as far away as New Zealand to pay homage.

¹For the Curies, though, their triumph contained the seeds of their tragedy.

²Remember, they worked around radioactivity nearly every day.

³Even before winning the Nobel, Pierre was severely ill from exposure to this fierce energy.

⁴He had open sores on his hands and fingers, and increasing difficulty walking.

⁵In 1906, he fell into the path of a wagon drawn by two huge draft horses, and a wheel ran over his head.

⁶He died instantly.

¹Years later, Eve Curie, scarcely a year old when her father died, wrote that Pierre's death marked the defining moment in her mother's life: "Marie Curie did not change from a happy young wife to an inconsolable widow.

²The metamorphosis was less simple, more serious.

³A cape of solitude and secrecy fell upon her shoulders forever."

⁴Marie was just 38.

⁵The Sunday after the funeral, instead of staying with family and friends, she retreated to the lab.

⁶In her diary she wrote Pierre: "I want to talk to you in the silence of this laboratory, where I didn't think I could live without you."

¹The work that Marie and Pierre had begun went on after his death.

²A second Nobel in chemistry went to Marie alone for isolating the elements radium and polonium.

¹With the onset of World War I in 1914, she recognized that mobile X-ray units could save lives in battlefield hospitals, so she established a fleet of these vehicles, known as petites Curies, or little Curies.

²She and Irene drove one themselves.

¹Later she went back to the Radium Institute she established, teaching, traveling and lecturing until her death, at age 66, on July 4, 1934.

²The cause was aplastic pernicious anemia, most likely due to her long, devastating exposure to radium and other radioactive elements.

¹The Marie Curie that I discovered was no icon but a flesh-and-blood woman.

²She conquered huge professional obstacles but paid a terrible personal price.

³I know now how complex her life was—truly glorious and tragic.

¹It was hot that day in June 1999—so hot that musicians inside Moscow Conservatory's Great Hall wrapped themselves in wet sheets during breaks to stay cool.

²But even before the last echoes of their music faded away, they knew they'd done justice to the Russian-born beauty who'd come home to record her debut album.

¹After the taping the orchestra and crew quickly fled to their air-conditioned hotel rooms.

²Now the magnificent hall was quiet.

¹The 29-year-old cellist walked through the empty seats, her back straight as a dancer's.

²She climbed onto the stage and stood beneath the great domed ceiling.

³Closing her eyes, she listened.

¹Through the silence she heard the music—Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky.

²Then, soaring above them, she heard the deep, sonorous tones of her father's virtuoso double bass.

¹Ivan Kotov had been dead 14 years now.

²But standing where he had studied and performed, Nina sensed that he was near.

³She could feel his energy, along with the energy of all the great masters who had played here.

⁴Then she knew, at last, that the strange, whirlwind course of her life had a purpose after all.

¹Ivan Kotov was a big man, both physically and emotionally; it was said he handled the enormous double bass as though it were a violin.

¹When Nina was three, she delighted her father by dropping candy through the holes of his bass.

²A few years later she discovered the sweet sound of the cello, an instrument much like her father's but closer to her own size.

¹Invited to study cello at the Moscow Conservatory at age seven, Nina practiced endlessly, until her fingers bled and her head pounded.

²She pushed furniture against her bedroom door to keep her mother and other distractions out.

³In her mind, "the music was the only thing that existed," she recalls in softly accented English.

¹Yet even as Nina lost herself in the world of music, her father found more and more doors in that world closed to him.

²Proud and independent, Ivan fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities.

³Though he was widely regarded as a virtuoso, his reputation as a troublemaker interfered with his career and kept him from fulfilling the promise of his talent.

⁴Still, through it all, Nina idolized her father and deeply resented what she took to be signs of his rejection and increasing isolation.

¹In 1985, when 15-year-old Nina won the prestigious Prague International Competition, her joy was dampened by news of her father's declining health.

²Hospitalized with a lung condition, Ivan died at the age of 35.

¹To Nina, the cause of death was clear: her father's spirit had been crushed under the weight of oppression.

²And in her mind, the persecution did not end there.

³She's convinced that after Ivan was gone, she was made to suffer for his freewheeling behavior.

¹Nina's triumph in Prague should have been her ticket to a glorious musical career.

²Instead, there were no accolades, no concerts scheduled.

³"Only a few of my co-students would even consider to greet me," she says.

⁴Her cello teacher arranged to meet her mother in the subway to avoid being overheard.

⁵"Get Nina out," he whispered.

⁶"She has no future here."

¹Two years would pass before Nina got her chance.

²When her instructor heard she had been invited to visit friends in Germany, he gave her a letter of introduction to a colleague at the Cologne Conservatory.

³But before she could travel, she had to face the KGB and request a visa.

¹"What could there be anywhere else that does not exist here?"

²the government agents asked.

¹Freedom!

²thought Nina.

³Then, in a sweet voice, she answered, "I just want to see another part of the world.

⁴I'll be back in a month."

⁵Unbelievably, they let her go.

¹And so, in the spring of 1989, Nina gave her state-owned cello back to the Moscow Conservatory.

²She packed a suitcase, took some Russian nesting dolls and a bottle of vodka for gifts, grabbed her father's beloved bass and, on a sunny spring afternoon, boarded a train for Germany.

¹By now, Glasnost was beginning to spread a sense of hope and greater freedom across the Soviet Union.

²Nina was accepted at the Cologne Conservatory and studied there until 1990.

³Returning to Russia, she was struck by the changes already sweeping the country.

⁴Still, even in this new political climate, she realized her future lay elsewhere—in America.

¹In 1992 she accepted a full tuition scholarship at Yale University.

²But her days in the Ivy League were short-lived; after only two months the little money she'd saved ran out, forcing her to leave Yale.

³Living in New York, she became increasingly desperate as she searched for a job.

¹One day a friend suggested that Nina, a natural beauty with high cheekbones and beguiling eyes, go to an open call at the Ford modeling agency.

²Nina rejected the idea at first; music alone was her love.

¹But she had no money, no cello.

²She did, however, have her looks.

³So she dabbed on a bit of mascara for the first time in her life and reluctantly headed down to the tryout.

¹The agency signed her up, and before long she was dashing from one photo shoot to another.

²After a short while with Ford, she left to join an agency called Click.

¹Yet even with all the attention, Nina never took well to the world of haute couture.

²This is nonsense, she thought as the cameras clicked and whirred.

³She felt embarrassed that her body had become simply a hanger for fancy clothes.

¹"Ninka," as she called herself briefly, hardly recognized the glamorous creature that began to appear in American and European fashion magazines.

²"That girl is not really me," she once told an autograph seeker.

³"She's my twin sister."

¹With her first paycheck—all of $300—Nina bought a cheap cello, and from then on it was as much a part of her life as her makeup box.

²When she traveled she bought a second airline ticket for "Mr.

³Cello."

¹And when she wasn't sashaying down the catwalk or posing for the camera, she was practicing, losing herself in the music she could now create with her hands, not just hear in her head.

¹Gradually, the musical side of her life took over, and in 1995 Nina quit modeling and moved to London to join her mother and stepfather.

²Her modeling friends were shocked.

³How could she simply quit?

¹Nina, on the other hand, was exuberant.

²She never doubted she would return to music.

³"I'd been a musician since I was seven years old," she says.

⁴"It possesses you."

¹Month after month she worked to get in shape for her new life.

²Then, in the spring of 1996, her mother and stepfather decided to give Nina's career a fitting send-off with a party at their London home.

¹There was champagne, caviar and, as the main attraction, a performance by Nina in the family's private concert hall.

²The event, held on Ivan Kotov's birthday, marked Nina's re-emergence in the world of music.

¹It turned out to be a prelude for grander things to come.

²Four months after her musical "coming out" party, Nina got a call from her manager.

³As he explained, one of the musicians that scheduled to perform at an upcoming concert in London's prestigious Wigmore Hall had suddenly dropped out.

⁴The show was only two weeks away.

⁵Could Nina fill in?

¹Dressed in a red silk gown her mother had designed, Nina looked dazzling as she sat with her cello on the stage at Wigmore Hall.

²It was July 22, 1996, and she was about to debut her own composition in the auditorium that had hosted the London debuts of nearly every major musician of the past 90 years.

¹Looking calm and relaxed, she touched her bow to the strings and launched into one demanding piece after another.

²Sergei Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky—and then, Nina Kotova: "Sketches from the Catwalk," a musical interpretation of her two dizzying years as a fashion model.

¹The performance launched Nina on a whole new trajectory.

²Suddenly a media darling, she became the subject of articles not only in music magazines, but in the same slick glossies whose pages she'd graced as a model.

¹In the struggling classical-music business, Nina was a marketer's dream.

²Photos on her 1999 debut album, recorded under the domed ceiling in Moscow where her father had performed, show Nina draped in richly patterned silks and satins, makeup highlighting her gazelle eyes.

³Buyers found her irresistible: her first CD sold some 46,000 copies, an amazing figure for a classical recording.

¹Since she left modeling, Nina has performed in major concert halls all over the world.

²She has lovingly retired Mr.

³Cello and now plays a $1-million 1696 Guarneri.

⁴She's living in a cavernous town house in Dallas and renovating another house not far away, where she will move after her upcoming marriage.

¹For Nina, though, her greatest triumph is that, finally she has found happiness in a world of music.

¹Wearing jeans and a gray silk kimono, Nina glides into a spare bedroom at home and sits on a straight-backed chair.

²She pulls her cello close and begins to play.

¹Now soaring, now tripping and dancing, the music weaves a tale of delight and wonder.

²Nina closes her eyes as her mind floods with memories—of Russia, of her childhood, of her father.

¹She plays for him still.

²And somewhere, she knows, Ivan Kotov is listening.