The life of Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie was celebrated at an International Women's Day premiere of "Radioactive", a new movie starring Rosamund Pike as the pioneering woman.
"Radioactive
The life of Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie was celebrated at an International Women's Day premiere of "Radioactive", a new movie starring Rosamund Pike as the pioneering woman.
"Radioactive" is directed by French-Iranian director Marjane Satrapi and also features Sam Riley as Marie's husband Pierre Curie and Anya Taylor-Joy as their daughter Irene.
The movie tracks Polish-born Curie's career from her humble home laboratories in the late 1800s to her Nobel wins and the battlefields of World War One, where Curie and her daughter brought their mobile X-ray machines in order to save soldiers' lives.
Curie's passionate relationships with Pierre and later his student Paul Langevin, as well as her role as a mother are at the centre of the film.
Moving from sun-bathed Paris to the Nevada desert, an oncology ward and the streets of Hiroshima, "Radioactive" also highlights the consequences of the Curies' research and discoveries.
Curie herself died at 66 from her prolonged, unprotected exposure to radium.
"I fell in love with her, really," Pike said of Curie, adding that she prepared for the part by plastering photos of the scientist along the walls of her trailer, reading every biography she could get her hands on and even taking science classes.
The 41-year-old British actress said she hoped the movie would inspire young girls to take up science.
"In some ways there's the problem that maybe Marie Curie is sort of too brilliant a role model because, you know, we want to encourage girls into science at all turns and you know, maybe if you see someone who won two Nobel prizes and also gave birth to a daughter who also won a Noble prize maybe that's sort of too much to aspire to," she said.
"But nonetheless I think our film humanises the icon and shows you that inside this brilliant mind was a real woman with, you know, traumas and problems and difficulties and struggles," Pike said.
The Curies were the most successful "Nobel Prize family".
The husband-and-wife partnership of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie were awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Marie Curie herself won the 1911 chemistry prize.
Their daughter Irene Joliot-Curie was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with her husband, Frederic Joliot.
"Radioactive" is released in the United Kingdom on March 20 and the United States on April 24.
The life of Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie was celebrated at an International Women's Day premiere of..