Madame Curie (film)
Madame Curie is a 1943 American biographical film made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and produced by Sidney Franklin from a screenplay by Paul Osborn, Paul H. Rameau, and Aldous Huxley (uncredited), adapted from the biography by Ève Curie. It stars Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, with supporting performances by Robert Walker, Henry Travers, and Albert Bassermann. The film tells the story of Polish-French physicist Marie Curie in 1890s Paris as she begins to share a laboratory with her future husband, Pierre Curie. This was the fourth of nine onscreen pairings between Pidgeon and Garson. In several versions, much of the scientific aspects of the film were cut down or edited out entirely. Turner Classic Movies has shown it unedited at 124 minutes. Plot Marie Skłodowska is a poor, idealistic student living in Paris and studying at the Sorbonne. She neglects her health and one day faints during class. Her tutor, Prof. Perot is sympathetic and, finding that she has no friends or family in Paris, invites her to a soirée his wife is throwing for a "few friends" (primarily professors and their wives). Among the many guests is physicist Pierre Curie, an extremely shy and absentminded man completely devoted to his work. He allows Marie to share his lab and finds that she is a gifted scientist. Appalled that she plans on returning to Poland to teach after graduation, rather than devoting her life to further study, he takes her to visit his family in their country home. Marie and Pierre both tend to concentrate on science to the extent that they don't realize until the last minute they have fallen in love. Even when Pierre asks Marie to be his wife, he does so in terms of reason, logic and chemistry. Fascinated by a demonstration she saw as an undergraduate, of a pitchblende rock that seems to generate enough energy to take small photographs, Marie decides to make the rock's energy the subject of her doctoral study. The measurements she takes don't seem to add up, and she decides there must be a third radioactive element in the rock in addition to the two she knows are in it. In the midst of discussing this, she discloses offhandedly to Pierre's family that she is pregnant. The physics department at the Sorbonne refuses to fund their research without more proof of the element's existence, but allows them to use a dilapidated old shed across the courtyard from the physics building. In spite of its disadvantages, they import eight tons of pitchblende ore and cook it down to look for the element they call radium. In spite of inability to separate out pure radium, they know something is definitely there, as Marie's hands are being burned. They hit on a tedious method of crystallization to arrive at pure radium. Now world-famous, they go on vacation to rest after all the press conferences and the Nobel Prize. They're granted a new laboratory by the university; before its dedication