One brief, passing shot in the opening scene of Radioactive, the new biopic of the scientist Marie Curie, tells its viewers everything about its subject’s lifelong obsession. As the film begins, close to the end of her story, the middle-aged Curie (played by Rosamund Pike), can be seen busying herself around her house with characteristic intensity. As she fiddles and fusses, we glimpse something in her hand. It is a phial of a vibrant blue chemical, which she nurses like a good luck charm, carrying it with her wherever she goes. The camera doesn’t linger, but the image is powerful and telling.
Scientist Marie Curie’s (played by Rosamund Pike in a new film, pictured) discoveries have shaped much of the modern world. She was the first person – and the only woman – to win the Nobel Prize twice. Curie died of anaemia brought on by exposure to high levels of radiation
Like the cartoon character Homer in the opening credits of The Simpsons – who ends up with a bar of radioactive material shoved down the back of his shirt – Curie had unwittingly invited a killer into her home. The phial contains radium, the element she first unearthed. In the film she is seen cradling it as she sleeps, her hands red and raw.
Curie died in 1934, aged 66, of anaemia brought on by exposure to high levels of radiation; she was ultimately a victim of the discovery she had made.
‘But that does not diminish what she achieved,’ says Marjane Satrapi, the renowned Iranian filmmaker who directed the movie. ‘Her courage, her determination, the fact she was a woman triumphing in a man’s world: everything about her is remarkable.’
Curie’s discoveries have shaped much of the modern world. She was the first person – and the only woman – to win the Nobel Prize twice. Without her pioneering work on radioactivity, we would not have X-rays or modern cancer treatment. But equally, had she not been around, history might also not have been obliged to record Hiroshima, Chernobyl and the nuclear arms race. As the film does not shy away from suggesting.
‘You threw a stone in the water,’ her character is told in the film by her daughter Irene (Emma’s Anya Taylor-Joy) as she lies dying, ‘the ripples you cannot control.’
Marie Curie with her daughters, Eve and Irene, in 1908. In 1935, a year after her mother’s death from radiation poisoning, Irene became the third Curie to win the Nobel Prize
Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867, to a family of academics, Curie was an ambitious, ferociously hard-working young woman. In her 20s, stymied by the misogyny in her native Poland, she moved to Paris to further her education. There, she met a fellow scientific obsessive, Pierre Curie (brilliantly played by Sam Riley). Although she initially spurned his romantic advances, soon she fell in love and within a year they were married.
‘He was a wonderful man, very modern in his respect for his wife’s intellectual capabilities,’ says Satrapi. ‘Would that we all could meet someone like Pierre.’
Theirs was a relationship built on mutual admiration and professional respect. And it was a partnership that quickly made astonishing discoveries in the field of radioactivity. Both husband and wife were curious about elements that gave off energy.
Working with a naturally occurring compound called pitchblende, Marie discovered there was something in it that made Pierre’s primitive instrumentation glow. Whatever it might be, however, it was present in such tiny amounts she was required to wade through industrial quantities of the tar-like stuff to find even minute traces. Her work in the laboratory often resembled that of a miner, digging her way through tons of filth.
‘Physically it was very challenging for her, mixing the pitch,’ says Csaba Horvath, Radioactive’s scientific adviser. ‘We tried to make that as realistic as possible.’
Indeed, the laboratory in which we see Curie digging and sifting was meticulously recreated by Satrapi’s art department.
‘They put tremendous energy into making it accurate,’ adds Horvath. ‘There was photographic documentation of the Curies’ lab, so they reproduced it in amazing detail. In the early days we know the pair worked in very bad conditions. Their lab was leaking, cold, very inhospitable.’
In the film the set was put together using period equipment borrowed from the labs at a religious high school in Budapest. Initially, the art department had approached the Curie Museum in Paris seeking to use items from the original facility. However, that idea was soon knocked back: much of the Curies’ gear became contaminated and remains dangerous to touch 100 years on. Marie’s notebook is so radioactive it has to be kept in a sealed, lead-lined display case. It meant the film technicians were obliged to recreate items, such as the electrometer, which Pierre invented to measure radioactivity, from photos taken at the museum.
‘It was really important to communicate how tough it was for them in the early days,’ says Satrapi. ‘Everything was against them.’
In 1902, from a ton of pitchblende, Marie managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium chloride, the magical compound she was convinced was hidden within it. She had discovered the most radioactive element on Earth. And with it the key, she believed, to creating power.
‘Rosamund was extremely dedicated,’ says Horvath of Pike. ‘She took equipment home and practised her pipetting. She was into the little details, like the way you should hold an electrogram, what she should point at. Such was her approach, I said that if she ever gave up acting she could have a place in my lab.’
Curie was a feisty, uncompromising character. The clashes she had with male authority (largely the head of the University of Paris, played by Simon Russell Beale) are not exaggerated. She was frequently traduced simply for being a woman, one whose head was constantly bruised from banging against the glass ceiling. Curie felt particularly targeted after Pierre was killed in a road accident in 1906. Heartbroken, she determined to continue their work and became the first female professor in French academic life when she was given his post at the University of Paris in honour of their work. But when, in 1910, she sought comfort in the arms of a married colleague, the affair became a nationwide scandal and her home in France was besieged by an angry crowd. Her crime appeared largely to be that she was a woman and a foreigner, rather than a husband-stealer.
In 1911, however, such issues were forgotten when she won her second Nobel Prize, for the discovery of pure radium. This time the award was for chemistry (she remains the only person in history to have been awarded the prize in different scientific disciplines).
‘She never patented her discovery,’ says Satrapi. ‘She believed it belonged to the world. It meant she never profited financially from the business that developed, in the way that so many others did.’
Without Marie Curie’s pioneering work on radioactivity, we would not have X-rays or modern cancer treatment
Curie was not motivated by personal gain, as was evident during the First World War. Noting how many men were suffering from unnecessary amputations in makeshift medical facilities, she established mobile radiography units, which quickly became known as ‘petites Curies’, to bring proper X-rays to the front line. Working tirelessly with her older daughter Irene, she drove up and down the front, stalling her scientific work for several years to dedicate herself to medical advancement. It is estimated that more than a million wounded soldiers were treated in her units.
After the war, fêted around the world for her discoveries, she spent less and less time in the laboratory. Much to her frustration, she made no more significant discoveries. She did, however, establish a number of institutions and research facilities to further the work she had begun. And her baton was picked up by Irene, who became the third Curie to win the Nobel Prize, in 1935, a year after her mother’s death.
‘She was an incredible woman, very modern in her outlook and life,’ says Satrapi, of a scientist whose name is still renowned, albeit largely because it is attached to one of Britain’s largest charities, Marie Curie cancer care. ‘And I’m glad that her story is about to become better known.’
‘Radioactive’ is in cinemas on March 20