American physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer was married to biologist Katherine Puening Vissering and they had two children. Let’s meet his partner, son, and daughter.
We weren’t all planning to see Oppenheimer—it is the longest Christopher Nolan film to date, after all—but then it somehow became intertwined with Barbie.
Oppenheimer is one of the most anticipated films of 2023. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, the biopic focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer and his involvement in the Manhattan Project during World War II.
Oppenheimer appeals to history buffs and thriller junkies, but now, it’s widened its range to the pop princesses of millennials.
With an all-star ensemble cast led by the brooding Cillian Murphy, the film is an epic portrayal of the man behind the creation of the atomic bomb.
Following the movie gaining traction and garnering mixed reactions on social media, many want to know more about Julius Robert Oppenheimer’s family. Like, who he was married to, and the number of kids he had. Read on for more about Julius Robert Oppenheimer’s personal life.
Credit: AP:Associated Press
Credit: AP:Associated Press
Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wife?
In November 1940, Oppenheimer tied the knot with his wife, Katherine “Kitty” Puening. And the story of their relationship was incredibly controversial at the time. Kitty was already on her third husband before marrying the mastermind behind the Manhattan Project.
When the duo met in 1939 at a party, the German-American botanist fell head over heels for the theoretical physicist. Less than a year later, Kitty became pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child while still married to her third husband and subsequently filed for divorce.
Credit: AP:Associated Press
Who was Katherine Oppenheimer Vissering?
Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer was a German-American botanist and wife of Los Alamos Scientific Director J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Kitty was briefly a lab technician at Los Alamos as a biologist, and botanist under the supervision of Dr. Louis Hempelmann but quit after a year. She was also a former member of the Communist Party of America.
She was born with the real name Katherine Puening on August 8, 1910, in Recklinghausen, Germany but died on October 27, 1972, in Panama City, Panama. Her Ashes scattered at sea off Carval Rock, near Saint John, U.S. Virgin Islands.
She was also known by the names Katherine Ramseyer; Katherine Dallet; and Katherine Harrison with all the maiden names being the names of her ex-partners.
She studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pittsburgh.
Puening was married to her first husband Frank Ramseyer, an American studying music in Paris under Nadia Boulanger. She later told friends that she had discovered evidence that Ramseyer was a homosexual and a drug addict. She also had an abortion.
She later married Richard Stewart Harrison from 1938 to 1940.
She was also in a relationship with Joseph Dallet Jr. from 1934 to 1937 before moving to J. Robert Oppenheimer.
How many children did J. Robert Oppenheimer have?
In the over 2 decades of marriage between Physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer and Katherine Puening, they were blessed with two children; a son and a daughter. The names of their kids are Peter Oppenheimer and Katherine “Toni” Oppenheimer Silber.
Peter was born in 1941 in California and moved with his parents to Los Alamos when his father became the course director of Los Alamos [National] Laboratory. Most of his childhood, however, was spent in Princeton, New Jersey during the period that his father was the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Their daughter was born on December 7, 1944, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States but died on January 1977.
Where did J. Robert Oppenheimer go to school?
Being tasked with the development of the nuclear weaponry that ended World War II required Oppenheimer to be an expert in his field. And his impressive academic accomplishments assisted with just that.
Before college, the theoretical physicist attended the Ethical Culture Society School in New York before starting his undergraduate career at Harvard in 1922.
In 1925, Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude and proceeded to conduct research alongside British physicist J.J. Thompson at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory in England.
From there, the atomic bomb creator obtained his Ph.D. at age 22 when he studied under German-British physicist Max Born at the University of Göttingen in Germany.
SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES
‘Oppenheimer’ is entirely based on a true story, as well as on a book.
Oppenheimer is a biographical story inspired by a novel about its central character. In the case of Oppenheimer, writer-director Christopher Nolan took his inspiration from the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. However, that book is based on the true story of Robert J. Oppenheimer’s life.
Robert J. Oppenheimer, played in the film by Cillian Murphy, is known today as the “father of the atomic bomb,” but he was a much more complex character. He wasn’t just an evil warmonger excited to bomb Hiroshima. In fact, he was more likely the opposite. But his gray areas of morality make him a perfect titular character.
Christopher even said to Total Film magazine (via Games Radar), “I think of any character I’ve dealt with, Oppenheimer is by far the most ambiguous and paradoxical. Which, given that I’ve made three Batman films, is saying a lot.” It sure is!
Oppenheimer is now a household name because of his leadership on the Manhattan Project. Without him, the hundreds of thousands of civilians who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have lived much longer. But he’s lauded as a complicated figure; without the atomic bomb, the war would have likely lasted much longer and taken many other lives (although probably not as many innocent lives).
Regardless, Oppenheimer may have been unaware of exactly how the atomic bomb would be used when he built it. At first, he and the team were told they were in a race against Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapon development. But when Germany surrendered before either developed the weapon, the atomic bomb’s use was less clear.
SOURCE: UNIVERSAL
After the devastating bombings in Japan, Oppenheimer spent much of his life advocating against using nuclear weapons. He was so far left politically that he was actually stripped of his security clearance during the Red Scare. In addition, probes into his personal life to see if he had Communist ties led to the publicity of his affair with Jean Tatlock, who suffered from depression and took her own life amid their affair.