Wonder Woman, Warner Bros.’ latest incarnation of the DC Comics female superhero, was the most anticipated film of the summer, according to a survey by Fandango, besting other anticipated blockbusters like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok. Since it opened nationwide on June 2, the film has become a top grosser, earning more than $600 million mark at the box office, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

And while much of the buzz centered on its star, Israeli actor Gal Gadot, few are aware that the original Wonder Woman is believed to be modeled on BU alum Elizabeth Holloway Marston (LAW 1918), who graduated nearly a century ago. When Harvard-schooled lawyer and academic William Moulton Marston was planning to build a comic book series, it was Marston who suggested to her husband that the superhero should be a woman. William Marston, who was already famous for inventing the polygraph, chose the nom de plume Charles Moulton for the comic book, and in 1941 he published the first episode of Wonder Woman, which had the immortal 5,000-year-old Amazon princess, daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta, in her alter ego as Diana Prince, rescue a US Army Intelligence officer.

Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot and inspired by BU alum Elizabeth Holloway Marston (LAW 1918), opened June 2. Copyright Warner Bros.

Elizabeth’s daughter, Olive Ann Lamotte, has few doubts that her mother was the model for the first female superhero. In a 2001 Bostonia article, she described her mother as “a small package of dynamite,” and points out that she died in 1993 at the age of 100.

Warner Bros. hopes that its film also has a long and lucrative life, and it could happen. Critics are calling it the best film to date featuring a DC Comics character. “Wonder Woman is leavened by touches of screwball comedy, espionage caper, and romantic adventure,” A. O. Scott writes in a New York Times review. USA Today calls it “an action film, a romantic comedy and a coming-of-age story and a period piece and a war movie all in one.” And Entertainment Weekly says the movie is “smart, slick, and satisfying in all of the ways superhero films ought to be.”

Wonder Woman, created by William Moulton Marston under his nom de plume, Charles Moulton, is the subject of a summer blockbuster film, 76 years after her first appearance. Art by Harry Peter. Copyright DC Comics

Set against the backdrop of World War I, the film takes viewers back to the beginning of Wonder Woman’s story on the island of Themyscira. She leaves home for London after a US military pilot, played by Chris Pine, washes ashore and tells her about the events taking place in war-torn Europe. The film was directed by Patty Jenkins, the first woman, appropriately, to direct a major studio superhero genre film. Jenkins has already expressed interest in doing a sequel.

As for the real-life woman who inspired the creation of the Amazon princess, her story is equally unconventional. After earning a law degree from BU, Elizabeth went on to get a master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1921. She worked her entire life, lecturing at American and New York Universities and working as an editor at Encyclopedia Britannica and McCall’s magazine before going to work as assistant to the chief executive of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York, where she remained until she was 65.

Her personal life was even more unorthodox. She and her husband formed a ménage à trois with her husband’s former student, Olive Byrne, who bore two of his four children. The Marstons had adopted Byrne’s two children, and after Marston’s death in 1947, Elizabeth put her own children and Byrne’s two through college. She and Byrne continued living together until the latter’s death in the late 1980s.

Watch the trailer for Wonder Woman here.