Eve Curie, the daughter of Marie Curie, was the only one of her family not to receive a Nobel prize. Though she showed an aptitude for science, from an early age her inclinations were artistic. A career as a concert pianist led, with the outbreak of another world war, to lecturing and prolific journalism — including a tour reporting on the world at war, which she described in a bestselling book Journey among Warriors (1943). But her most celebrated work was perhaps her biography of her mother, published in 1937. Briskly combining affection with a disinterested account of her scientific endeavours, it was much acclaimed and has endured well.

She was born in Paris in 1904, the year after her mother won her first Nobel Prize in Physics (sharing it with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel). “In the house in Boulevard Kellerman, protected like a fortress against intruders,” she recalled, “Pierre and Marie led the same, simple hidden life.” Marie had worked her way from a straitened Polish childhood to Paris, marriage and worldwide fame. Eve and her sister Irène (older by seven years) grew up among eminent scientists.

On April 19, 1906, Pierre Curie was killed when he slipped and fell under the wheel of a horsedrawn wagon.

For the next four years Marie, struggling with grief, continued their work, while Pierre's father helped out at their home in Sceaux. For the children each day began with an hour's work, intellectual or manual, before they played outside. With the Great War, the children returned to Paris when evacuation proved unnecessary. Marie's services were in demand at hospitals, medical schools and near the battlefront until, in 1918, she delighted in Poland's new-found freedom.

Eve's piano skills were now clear, and she was encouraged to develop them. She was to be very much a Twenties spirit. “In advance of the fashion by some 15 years, we discovered beach life, swimming races, sun-bathing, camping out on deserted islands, the tranquil immodesty of sport.” Marie was bemused by Eve's relish of the era's clothing fashions.

Marie Curie's quest for research funds led to an American tour with her daughters in 1921. They were almost bodyguards, such was the mob of reporters and others in an “irrepressible rush of enthusiasm” for the scientist, whose energies were so depleted by the demands of the trip that Eve and Irène represented her at some of the dinners held in her honour, even dressing in university gowns to accept degrees on her behalf. Such were Eve's spirits at times that the press dubbed her “the girl with radium eyes”.

Back home, she was the only one with decorative sense — “often disastrous” — in the big apartment where she and Marie lived alone after Irène's marriage to a fellow scientist, Frédéric Joliot. As always, dinner was central, Marie's remarks tracing “a mysterious and moving picture of the intense activity in that laboratory to which Mme Curie belonged, body and soul”. She once told Eve that she thought it “a source of disappointment to make all the interest of one's life depend upon sentiments as stormy as love”. In her biography Eve did not describe her mother's relationship with Paul Langevin, a former pupil of her dead husband.

Marie was delighted when Eve gained degrees in science and philosophy at the Collège Sévigné in 1925, though also encouraging the concerts which soon took her across France and Belgium. All the while they travelled throughout Europe. Eve nursed her mother through frequent ill-health, and was with her during the fatal illness brought on by years of work with radium.

Marie died in 1934, a year before Irène won a Nobel prize for atomic research and Eve assuaged her grief with work. Her biography of her mother. Madame Curie, went through many editions around the world, and was filmed in 1943 with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon.

By then Eve's writing had taken her far and wide. In Paris during the Thirties she wrote (sometimes using a pseudonym) on music, but the threat of war brought a political turn. With the German invasion of France, she left Paris on June 11, 1940, for England, one of 1,600 on a boat licensed for 390 who were strafed by German aircraft as they left the coast.

In London she joined the Free French, while in France the Vichy Government confiscated her house. She lunched with Churchill at Chequers, travelled to Scotland to meet the Polish Army and, appointed by Jean Giraudoux to the Commissariat of Information, went to America early in 1941. After lecturing widely on French women and the war, she was engaged by the Herald-Tribune in November to report from “an uninterrupted line of anti-Axis territories — some belligerent, some non-belligerent — stretching all around the earth”. She was to visit North Africa, Iraq, Iran, th Soviet Union, India, Burma and China, and cover 40,000 miles in five months.

A novice correspondent, she intended to approach each country with speed, her impressions fresh. She took a Clipper aircraft bound for Africa's West Coast via Brazil and the South Atlantic — a secret journey in the company of military men destined to fly war supplies from airfields there. From Lagos she went to Chad and then Cairo before visiting the Libyan front in the Western Desert.

In Beirut she met General Catroux, and in Tehran, the Shah. In Russia she saw villages destroyed by the Germans. In Basra she noted sympathies for Hitler: “They admire strength and they want to be firmly ruled. We, the democracies, offer the Iraquis neither freedom (for we occupy their country) nor leadership (for we interfere but little with their internal affairs) — so they despise us and hate us”.

In China she met Zhou Enlai and the Soong sisters, and in India, Nehru (“a handsome prince in a fairy tale”), Stafford Cripps and Gandhi.After returning to New York, she joined the French forces in Europe as part of the army women's division.

With Paris retaken, she ran a daily afternoon paper, Paris-Press, from 1945 to 1949, and in 1952 became an adviser to the Secretary-General of Nato and married Henry Labouisse, the US Ambassador to Greece. As executive director of Unicef, he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on its behalf in 1965.Irène died in 1956, another victim of the laboratory which had weakened her parents; and Irène's husband soon afterwards from a similar cause. Eve became an American citizen in 1958 and, as a widow in New York, was present at dinners in her honour at the age of 100 and beyond.

She is survived by a stepdaughter.

Eve Curie, journalist and humanitarian, was born on December 6, 1904. She died on October 22, 2007, aged 102