Skłodowska-Curie is a film character like no other. Her biography is full of romance, sudden turns of fate and lucky coincidences. Had she not existed, it would have been really difficult to invent a character like her. It is a real treat not only for a scriptwriter and film set designer, who have access to her original notes, including recipes, that survived her.

The “Marie Curie” film currently being produced as a Polish-French-Belgian-German cooperation sets out to tell the story of the discoverer of radium and polonium, the only Noble laureate in two categories, chemistry and physics, the first European woman with a PhD and professor title. It also portrays an ordinary woman – a wife and a mother. Skłodowska-Curie was no stranger to impulsive decisions. A lot of screen time is dedicated to her relationship with her husband, Pierre, a physicist and co-creator of the term “radioactivity”. After the death of her beloved husband she fell in love again - this time with the outstanding physicist Paul Langevin, a married man. Marie Noelle, the film's French director, explains that she wants to show “a person tormented by contradictions and dilemmas, but one that never lost sight of her objectives”.

So, the film not only tells a story of her heroic path to the Sorbonne that the impoverished Polish noblewoman had to follow, and how she earned her living as a governess after graduating secondary school with a golden medal, it also depicts an ambitious, driven and extremely intelligent woman born in Poland following the partitions, a woman willing to do anything to become a great scientist. And here she is. Marie Curie, as one of the few women in the history of the Sorbonne, graduated from the university in 1893 with a degree magna cum laude in physics, and a year later – in mathematics. She became the first woman professor in the history of Sorbonne. 

This is why international media write about the “Marie Curie” film as a feminist picture telling the story of the first woman who tried to shatter the glass ceiling in the world of science. Marie Noelle experienced some of these feelings herself, as she studied mathematics, before moving on to directing. Today, a hundred years after she made her discoveries, Marie Curie still continues to be the subject of critical comments uttered by modern scientists. Tim Hunt, the British laureate of the Noble Prize in medicine (2001), recently said: “Three things happen when they (women) are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them – they cry. I'm really glad that Marie Curie stopped crying and found the time to discover radium and polonium.” His words cost him his position at the University College of London, yet he is not alone in his attitude. According to Marie Noelle, these attitudes might be responsible for the fact that, in Europe, while it is girls who are better in mathematics at school, only 13 percent of scientists working with the sciences are women.

About Marie Curie, Noelle says that she was a woman who proved that women can compete with men in the sciences, adding that “within a space of six years, she gave birth to a child, lost her beloved husband with whom she shared her passion for scientific research and fell in love again (with a married man) sparking a high-profile public scandal, and then she wins another Nobel to top it all off”. According to the film maker, such a colourful life deserves a full biographic film, which will be shown in cinemas all over the world.