Mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner whose longtime struggle with mental illness inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind", was killed in a car crash along with his wife in New Jersey, state police said on Sunday.

The couple were in a taxi cab when the driver lost control and crashed into a guard rail on Saturday afternoon while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, said Sgt. Gregory Williams, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police.

Nash, 86, and his wife, Alicia, 82, were thrown from the vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene, Williams said.

Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.

The Oscar award-winning film "A Beautiful Mind" starring Russell Crowe was loosely based on his battle with schizophrenia.

Nash received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950 and spent much of his career there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He began experiencing what he described as "mental disturbances" in 1959 after marrying Alicia, a MIT physics major who was then pregnant, according to his biography on the Nobel Prize website.

"I was disturbed in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years," Nash said in a 2004 video interview on the Nobel website.

He stressed that his was an unusual case, as he was able eventually stop taking medication and return to normal activities and his research.

The 2001 movie represented an "artistic" take on his experience, giving insight into mental illness but not accurately portraying the nature of his delusions, Nash said in the interview.

The movie star who portrayed him, Crowe, wrote on Twitter that he was stunned by the deaths: "An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts," Crowe wrote.

Nash and his wife were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, according to New Jersey police.