Howard's film "A Beautiful Mind" was a wonderful movie that had very little to do with the truth either. There were so many errors, made up touches and such in that film it was amazing. Here is just a few for those who know that movie:
There is no such thing as a "ceremony of the pens".
John Nash had a child by a woman he lived with for years. He abandoned him, and the child was given up for foster care. The son with Alicia, in the movie, is also schizophrenic.
There is no speech at the Nobel prize ceremony.
Nash did not draw on windows. It was just a storytelling device.
He got a divorce from Alicia.
He spent years after leaving Alicia banging about Europe, writing home incomprehensible postcards about aliens and Jews.
He supposedly was arrested for indecent exposure in a public bathroom. Can we say homosexual? Alicia says no, but there were was more than one report of Nash's liasons with men.
There's lots more. One thing they did get right (from someone who knows) is what it is like to be married to someone with severe mental illness. In fact, I don't know anyone married to such a person who hasn't had a "phone episode".
I have come to the conclusion that RH just likes to tell good stories. Nothing wrong with that, but don't expect them to be truthful retellings.
I agree with your assessment of A Beautiful Mind. I read a biography of Nash after seeing the movie because I was so intrigued. Howard made Nash to appear to be a decent guy with terrible problems; in reality he was NOT a nice person, not a "beautiful" person. He was selfish and self-absorbed as well as mentally ill. Of course the delusions he saw were of aliens and he wrote against Jews so of course he puts a Jewish doctor in to save Nash in the movie. I think Nash was even weirder in real life than depicted in the movie. NOT a likeable person nor someone I would ever admire.
But have you EVER seen a Hollywood movie that was true to historical fact?
Hollywood types have always had a problem with 'reality' and the truth. None of them can see past their noses and are such whores that everything they turn out is flat, without dimension. I think it's because none of them read books. In the early years of film, directors drew from their education and reading. Films had scope and dimension and characters were believable. Now, directors have no intellectual or conceptual frame of reference unique to themselves as individuals so they draw from 'other' films, from everything that has been done already. Making a visual record from the recollection of a visual record is a twice abstracted form of expression and further than ever from art. Film as a cultural expression is by now exhausted. Now, films merely assault our senses and are more and more sensational all the time to draw the uneducated and easily entertained. Bread and circuses.
Another thing...Nash didn't start going nuts until he was 30.
Although he and Alicia divorced early on, they never really "split."