The Genius of Marie Curie, BBC Two

Marie Curie must rank right up there among the world’s achievers of greatness. She certainly wasn’t one of those who had it “thrust upon ’em”. In fact, fate stacked the odds against her achieving the eminence she did in just about every way possible.

She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw at a time when Poland was dominated by its Russian occupiers, and scientific training for Poles could only be had on the hoof in the underground, so-called “flying” universities. Through great good fortune she followed her sister to the Sorbonne, one of the very few universities accepting women at the time, in 1891. The first woman to win a Nobel prize, for physics in 1903 (a second, for chemistry, followed eight years later), her name was only included in the nomination for that first award at the insistence of her husband and collaborator, Pierre (the Vanity Fair illustration, pictured right, depicted her in a typically subsidiary role).

Subtitled “The Woman Who Lit Up the World”, Gideon Bradshaw’s documentary chose an episode from Curie's private life for its moment of crux. Five years after the early death of her husband Pierre in 1906, Marie was having a love affair with the physicist Paul Langevin (Pierre’s former pupil), hoping that he would leave his unhappy marriage for her. Instead, the passionate letters she wrote to him (read in the film by Geraldine James, main picture, above) were leaked to the press through the wiles of Langevin’s wife, and Curie was subjected to trial by tabloid, racially vilified as the “foreign woman” attacking the sanctity of a French family: her house was even attacked by an angry mob. Langevin, put out at accusations that he was “hiding behind a Polish woman’s skirts”, melodramatically challenged a newspaper editor to a duel that passed off without a bang, and then returned to his wife.

It was the only real hint at private feelings that we got in the film, a glimpse behind those mesmerisingly sad features (pictured below). Pierre’s marriage proposal, presented here as a silent film inter-title – “it would be a fine thing to pass our lives near each other, hypnotised by our scientific dream” – hardly hinted at passion; Curie, the prototype “modern woman”, was back in her laboratory very soon after she gave birth to her two daughters, passing almost complete care for them to her father-in-law.

Cambridge science historian Patricia Fara gamely led the cast of commentators here – another lady, back on the country estate in Poland where the young Maria had worked as a tutor, had a glorious snowy backdrop behind her straight out of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago – but Curie finally proved too considerable a figure to condense into an hour of screen time. It wasn't for lack of effort on Bradshaw's part: the director assembled a veritable farrago of visual material, mixing extracts from various screen adaptations of the Curie story with what must have been reconstructions, and some scenes that looked confusingly somewhere between the two. Archive was as full as it was inventively used.

Musically it was a mélange too, the more usual historical material mixed in with a snatch or two of Edith Piaf, and some contemporary balladic songs in English that melded so well they could have been written specially (one refrain, “I can’t get enough of that stuff”, mixed perfectly with black and white footage of a female figure stirring a cauldron of Curie's favourite research material, pitchblende). It left the impression that the director had considerable fun trying to "light up" his subject, even if Curie’s life here sounded much jollier than its details – as well as that haunting face – would suggest it really was.