Genius of Marie Curie

The first woman to be awarded a Nobel prize, Marie Curie was an extraordinary woman whose story is as remarkable in the modern day as it was last century. In her lifetime, she became a rare thing: a celebrity scientist, attracting the attention of the news cameras and tabloid gossip, fascinated by a woman winning prestigious awards and making groundbreaking discoveries. But how did Marie Curie achieve such great things in a time when a woman’s place was in the home, not the laboratory? This documentary takes a fresh look at one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and discovers how she achieved both her professional accomplishments and raised a family – all in the face of prejudice, sexism and her own ill health. But while the obstacles she had to overcome, the years of painstaking research, and the penalty she ultimately paid for her discovery of radium have become one of the iconic stories of scientific heroism, these are only the bare bones of her scientific life. There is another, unexplored side to Marie Curie: her human story. This multi-layered film reveals the real Marie Curie, an extraordinary woman who fell in love three times, had to survive the pain of loss, and the public humiliation of a doomed love affair. The film also hears from the scientists who have carried on Marie’s work to the present day, uncovering the true extent of her legacy to science and medicine. This is a riveting portrait of a tenacious mother and scientist, who opened the door on a whole new realm of physics, which she discovered and named: radioactivity